Jean Bodin’s Pluralist Sovereignty?

• In Event: Theories of Sovereignty: Bodin, Hobbes, Mazzini, and Tocqueville

Abstract

Recent theories of “legal pluralism” draw on assertions of the inherently anti-pluralist nature of the monist, political-theological conception of sovereignty to argue against it. Pluralism urges us to “view normative conflict among multiple, overlapping legal systems as not only unavoidable but sometimes even desirable, both as a source of alternative ideas and as a site for discussion about community definition and creative innovation.” (Paul Schiff Berman, 2009) Sovereignty, as a monist concept, must be intrinsically opposed to pluralism. Yet, Jean Bodin, the self-described “discoverer” of sovereignty as the animating, metaphysical force of law consistently wrote in defense of toleration and religious pluralism from his early Method for the Easy Comprehension of history to the posthumously published Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime. Further, Bodin’s monist sovereignty is conceived as operational to the pluralist legal and political system(s) and institutions of 16thC France. This paper argues that Jean Bodin should be understood as a friend of pluralism not despite his monist conception of absolutist sovereignty, but, rather precisly because of the way he conceives of sovereignty as the temporal analogue to the absolute, divine sovereignty of God. Theorizing in the midst of the French Wars of Religion, Bodin’s monism dramatically lowers the stakes of doctrinal diversity by reducing the amount of mutual trust and consensus among subjects that is theoretically required to maintain peace and stability within a polity. This not only allows for a great amount of internal diversity and disagreement between subjects as individuals and bounded communities, but, rather, Bodin’s cosmological understanding of the republic actually assumes antonomy and conflict to be constitutive of divine (and thus temporal) harmony, rather than its opposite. Further, Bodin’s understanding of the overlapping and complicated interplay between various systems of law (Callic, cannon, civic) en force in the France of his day points toward an understanding of sovereignty that is not homogenizing in the same way that it is imagined to be today by many of its critics and defenders. This is not to say that Bodin was a “legal pluralist” by today’s standards, but the fact that the intellectual ‘father’ of sovereignty would not fit so easily into either camp in today’s conflict between “sovereigntists” and “pluralists” might give us reason to pause and wonder about necessity of some of the underlying assumptions framing the discussion.

Author

• Catherine R. Power, Glendon College, York University