Jean Bodin

Jean Bodin (1530 to 1596) was a French jurist and political philosopher whose 1576 work Les Six Livres de la Republique (Six Books of the Commonwealth) gave sovereignty its first systematic theoretical treatment, defining it as the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth, undivided and not subject to any earthly superior. Writing amid the French Wars of Religion, Bodin argued a strong, unified sovereign authority was necessary to hold a fractured realm together, and his formulation became the foundation every later theorist of sovereignty, from Hobbes onward, answered or revised.