Six Books of the Commonwealth

Bodin defines sovereignty as the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth — the highest power of command, unlimited in scope and duration, and not subject to the commands of any superior . Its primary mark is the power to make and break law without consent. Bodin explicitly rejects any division or sharing of sovereignty, arguing that if the prince, nobles, and people all had a part in it, the result would be confusion about who commands and who obeys . He also rejects the Renaissance ideal of the mixed constitution as impractical for a large, diverse state like France .

Bodin argues that the mixed constitution works only in small, homogeneous city-states like Florence or Venice; it cannot stabilize a large, religiously divided kingdom like France . If sovereignty is indivisible by nature, then any arrangement claiming to share it between monarch, aristocracy, and democracy is incoherent — there can be only one lawgiver. Bodin dismisses the claim that France's Parlement, Estates-General, and King form a mixed constitution as 'not only absurd but treasonable,' because it exalts subjects to the level of their sovereign . His alternative is a single sovereign monarch who governs through aristocratic and popular institutions.

Bodin separates the location of sovereignty (the state's form) from the way it is administered (the government's form). A state can be a monarchy — sovereignty residing in one person — while its government is aristocratic if the prince grants offices and honors only to nobles, or popular if he distributes them equally without regard to birth or wealth . This distinction allows Bodin to defend monarchy as the best state form while accommodating the practical reality that a king must delegate. It also permits him to describe a monarchy 'tempered' by aristocratic and popular government through what he calls harmonic justice .

Bodin wrote the Six Books in 1576, four years after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, when France was fractured by Catholic-Huguenot conflict . His primary aim was to exclude any legal ground for forcible resistance to the king, which he saw as the mechanism driving the cycle of violence . By locating sovereignty exclusively in the monarch, Bodin denied both Huguenot theorists and Catholic Leaguers the right to justify rebellion. The work opens with a letter expressing a desire to 'save this Kingdom' — a project of restoring unity through a single, unchallengeable authority.

Bodin's sovereign is absolute with respect to human law — he is not bound by the commands of predecessors or by his own edicts, and he may derogate from them at will . But he is bound by the laws of God and nature, which stand above him. He is also bound by the contracts he makes with his subjects or with foreign princes, because these obligations fall under natural law . Bodin's absolutism is therefore not arbitrary: the sovereign cannot legitimately seize his subjects' property without cause, and he remains accountable to divine and natural justice even when no earthly court can judge him.

The Six Books was published in French in 1576 and became a landmark almost immediately — studied at Cambridge and London by the late 1570s, and translated by Bodin himself into Latin in 1586 for scholarly audiences . Between 1576 and 1629 it saw at least fourteen French editions, nine Latin editions, and translations into Italian, Spanish, German, and English (1606) . Its theory of indivisible sovereignty informed royalist ideology in France and England. Modern scholars recognize it as the first systematic attempt to construct a political science between Aristotle and Hobbes .