Bodin’s Universe and its Paradoxes: Some Problems in the Intellectual Biography of Jean Bodin

Abstract

Positivistic biographies of Bodin (the only ones there are) have not been much interested in the peculiar quiddity of Bodin’s thought but rather sought to place Bodin within various traditions of European thought, seeing him variously as one of the inventors of‘sovereignty’, the predecessor of Montesquieu’s climatic determinism, a contributor to the bullion theory of inflation, an influence on seventeenth-century English political thought, or one of the founders of the liberal theory of religious toleration. Such approaches have emphasised the positivistic character of Bodin’s thought to the neglect of its religious, or, as his biographers reprovingly say, its mystic, element.¹