formulation of the doctrine of utility, for his capture of the contract theory and his use of it as a weapon against rebellion, but above all for his development and purification of Bodin's conception of sovereignty. James Harrington (1611–77) we have already noted as a man keenly interested in the social problems of the period. He was also a radical, a republican, a democrat, with strong and clear views respecting the natural equality of men, the sovereignty of the people, and the necessity of wide popular education-a seventeenth-century Rousseau. Finally, Benedict Spinoza (1632-77), noble and illustrious representative of a persecuted race, made for himself a name for ever honourable by his curbing of the Leviathan of Hobbes, and by his impassioned yet convincing plea for toleration and freedom. THE EDITOR BIBLIOGRAPHY BUTLER, G. Studies in Statecraft. 1920. 1921. FRANCK, A.: Réformateurs et publicistes de l'Europe. 1864. OGG, F. A.: Europe in the Seventeenth Century. 1924. II A JEAN BODIN GREAT deal has been said and written about Bodin; and there yet remains a good deal to be said. The He study of his writings leaves on one's mind an impression perhaps best described as one of vastness. There is vast book-learning, vast confusion, and an enormous, all-embracing effort. The man's reading and his writing were alike prodigious in amount. He knew nothing of relaxation or of recreation. He knew Hebrew and Greek and was in some degree acquainted with German and Italian. He knew the Talmud and Plutarch and the orations of Demosthenes. knew the Roman historians and drank deeply of Cicero. He had some knowledge of the medieval scholastics, though he knew the jurists better. He knew something of the law and constitution of all European states, and made a special study of certain of them. He knew the chronicles of France and studied with profit the writings of the historian Du Haillan and the registers of the Parlement of Paris. He knew the Old Testament line by line, though his acquaintance with the New Testament seems to have been slighter. He studied, as best he could, the strange jumble of the sciences of his day: astronomy and astrology, geography, physics, medicine and magic. He even made, himself, experimental investigations. The chief of the influences in his intellectual life seem to have been the Old Testament and New Platonic philosophy as interpreted by the Italian Platonists. From about the time when he left Toulouse for Paris, in 1560 or 1561, Bodin seems to have been engaged in an effort, ceaseless and prodigious, to synthesise all human knowledge. When he wrote the Methodus he had in mind the plan of a synthetic philosophy of the universe. The rest of his life was occupied with the execution of that plan. In the Methodus he established a base of operations and a plan of attack. There he laid it down that knowledge of God, without which there is no real knowledge, is best attained through the study first of man and then of non-human nature.' Then, for a time, he turned his attention to the study of economic conditions in France, convinced already that these were fundamentally important. In 1568 he published the Réponse, a book of which it has been said that it founded political economy. Certainly no earlier writer had seen so clearly the nature or the importance of economic processes or had dealt with them so definitely as a whole. These were but preliminary studies for the great work which appeared in 1576, The Six Books of the Republic. With that book Bodin finished his studies of man and of human society: he went on to complete his programme. The Démonomanie is an essay on one very serious and practical consequence of man's constant relation to a world of active spirits. Bodin was profoundly convinced that man lives under constant influence, good or evil, of beings of another world. The Heptaplomeres is a demonstration of the failure alike of Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Judaism to give a satisfactory account of the universe. His own account was supplied by Bodin in his Universe Nature Theatrum, published in the last year of his life. I can only hope he found it satisfactory. But Bodin was far from being only a speculative philosopher. In his Republic, at least, he desired above all to be practical. He wrote, avowedly, in view of the evils of the time. Since the ship of state, he says, is struggling in a storm so violent that captain and mariners are worn out with toil, needs must the passengers themselves lend a hand and let those who have not strength to pull a rope at least give advice and warning.1 He set himself, accordingly, to deal with every question of the moment that seemed to him important. He wrote the Republic not only to expound the nature of political society, but also to lay down general rules of policy and to advocate a number of specific reforms in France. It is useless, he declared, merely to imagine such a state as we should like to see. What is needed is understanding of things as they are, not dreams of what they might be. Bodin's political philosophy as a whole is too complex and 1 See the République, Preface. comprehensive to be dealt with here and now. But there is just one thing to which his importance in the history of political thought is commonly attributed and that is his theory of political sovereignty. The best thing that can be done under the circumstances is, I think, to concentrate on that. If I can succeed, within the limits appointed, in giving a clear exposition of that, with all its confusions and ambiguities, I shall have done what I rather think is impossible. If you read certain modern writers you might suppose that Bodin's theory of sovereignty is a tolerably simple thing; you will not think so if you read Bodin. That, after all, seems the right thing to do. I cannot resist the temptation to remark here that the study of the history of political thought seems to be still in adolescence. We seem to me to be just emerging from a stage of preliminary generalisations, frequently based on rather hazy impressions. Guesses may be useful as hypotheses to work on: they may even be valid. But sooner or later all students of the history of political thought will have to do what some do now, and study their texts with as much minuteness and interpret them with as exact a precision as is bestowed upon even the most insignificant constitutional documents. Harsh experience compels me, indeed, to admit that to read Bodin's Republic is a far from easy thing to do. He was, apparently, incapable of grouping his facts or arranging his argument in any tolerable order. The plan of the book is so confused that one sometimes wonders, in reading it, what he thought it was all about. In the first three books the arrangement, in which he seems to be guided by Aristotle, is tolerably orderly; all the rest is chaos. All the later books are miscellanies; even the chapters tend to be miscellaneous. He goes back and forth and back in the same chapter; he turns from ideal considerations to actual France without seeming aware of the change of subject; he discusses the means of guarding against revolution in one chapter and the question whether the property of felons should go to the treasury in the very next; he repeats himself continually and from book to book; he overwhelms his reader with illustrations that do not illustrate, with irrelevant references and with remarks on Roman and other history; he interlards the discussion with lengthy disquisitions on astrology and the magic that is hidden in numbers. His verbosity, his enormous prolixity, above all his immense seriousness unrelieved by the least gleam of humour, reduce one to something like despair. Nor has he any saving grace of style. His style has merits. There is no affectation; his pedantries and his verbosity are natural; he is always trying to say what he means. His style has power and weight; generally too much weight, but never too little. But it lacks grace and balance; it is positively harsh and arid. It lacks completely that quality of charm which is as important to a writer as to a woman. Powerful and original thinker as Bodin certainly was, he was, in the highest degree, a bore. For all that, painful as it may be to read him, if we are to explain his thought it has got to be done. And not only must the French text originally published in 1576 be studied, but all its important passages must be compared with the Latin text first published ten years later. It was, perhaps, the very worst of Bodin's failures that he did not definitely connect his theory of sovereign power with his theory of the effects of what he calls climate. But this failure at least relieves one of the necessity of considering the latter here. His theory of climate does, indeed, connect very closely with his discussion of the question as to the best form of sovereignty; but I do not propose now to enter into that. On the other hand, his theory of sovereignty is inseparably connected with his conception of social structure and more loosely with his view of the ends for which the state exists. Bodin saw France disorganised by faction and increasingly disordered. On all sides irreconcilable views were being expressed as to the nature of the French monarchy, the nature of political authority, and the duty of subjects. Bodin set himself to deal with every aspect of the problem; and all the questions debated in France at the time received reasoned answers in his Republic. He dealt, generally, with questions of policy and method in relation to circumstance, he warned of actual and immediate dangers, he suggested positive remedies and reforms. But he was aware that no argument from mere circumstance and immediate needs could satisfy in the long run or even at all. Most important of all was it that agreement should be reached on fundamental questions, for only so could order be permanently established. Formulæ had to be |