European Thinkers of the Seventeenth Century: Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin

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In the seventeenth century, a prominent group of European thinkers fostered a notion of power as “both absolute and unitary.” One purpose of these assertions was to justify the ever-increasing centralization of governmental authority within the several European nations. Foremost among these thinkers were Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin. Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) offered the enduring definition of sovereignty as “the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth” which “is not limited either in power, or in function, or in length of time.” In other words, sovereignty was held solely by one authority and could not be allocated among other, lesser authorities. Indeed, Bodin spurned the very idea of a lesser authority, claiming that the power and authority of a sovereign “cannot be relinquished or alienated”: “Just as God, the great sovereign, cannot make a God equal to Himself because He is infinite and logical necessity…two infinites cannot exist, so we can say that the prince, whom we have taken as the image of God, cannot make a subject equal to himself without annih...

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