Jean Bodin (around 1530-1596) was a French jurist and political philosopher who sat in the Parlement of Paris and held a law professorship at the University of Toulouse. He is best known for his theory of sovereignty, set out in The Six Books of the Republic (1576), which defined sovereignty as the absolute and perpetual power of a state and held that a sovereign prince answers only to God. His analysis treated sovereignty as indivisible while distinguishing the form of a state, its constitution, from its form of government, its administration, a distinction that shaped later political thought. Bodin also wrote on economics and historiography, and was among the first to study inflation systematically, connecting the money supply to rising prices in a way that laid groundwork for the quantity theory of money.
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Jean Bodin was a French jurist and political philosopher, member of the Parlement of Paris and professor of law at the University of Toulouse. Bodin lived during the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and wrote against the background of religious conflict in France. He seemed to be a nominal Catholic throughout his life but was critical of papal authority over governments. Known for his theory of sovereignty, he favoured the strong central control of a national monarchy as an antidote to factional strife.
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