The Six Bookes of a Commonweale

…able to write, in his Six Books of the Commonweal, that the king of France had absolute sovereignty because he alone in the kingdom had the power to give law unto all of his subjects in general and to every one of them in particular.

…Livres de la république (1576; The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, 1606) Bodin argued that the political bond that made every man subject to one sovereign power overrode religious differences. Bodin provided the link divine right did not allow between the king and his people; divine right was concerned with…

Bodin’s principal writing, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale (1576), won him immediate fame and was influential in western Europe into the 17th century. The bitter experience of civil war and its attendant anarchy in France had turned Bodin’s attention to the problem of how to secure order…

…Livres de la république (1576; The Six Bookes of a Commonweale [1606]), defended a near-absolutist conception of sovereignty and denied that ancient constitutions or mechanisms of consent could coherently limit the authority of the sovereign.