Sovereignty: A Painful State
There is a reason why some writers impatient with the idea of sovereignty have taken to calling it the mal de Bodin. The 16th-century French lawyer, who witnessed the flaring up of confessional conflicts and the start of the rapacious expansion of the European powers into other continents, was indeed the first to put into wide circulation the notion of an ‘absolute and perpetual power’. But Jean Bodin was not as great an innovator as he is sometimes made out to be. There already existed a thick web of medieval jurisprudence at the time when he wrote.
Starting from the late 11th century, lawyers had found ways to make themselves helpful to rulers by taking an occasional page out of Roman and canon law - and an occasional passage conveniently out of context - to buttress the authority of potentates no longer willing to subject themselves to the double sword of imperial and papal power. Their ingenious counter-move (which goes a long way towards explaining the paradoxes that bedevil the modern concept of sovereignty) was to make every king into an emperor, imperator in regno suo, with powers resembling divine omnipotence. The result was that ever since lawyers have found themselves struggling with secular versions of old theological quandaries. The question as to whether the British Parliament can make some of its acts trigger a mandatory referendum - a hot topic at the moment - is not very different from asking whether God can create a stone so heavy that even he cannot lift it.
Despite such paradoxes, the advent of an apparently well-defined notion of sovereignty equipped constitutional and political theory with a weapon that it would learn to twist and turn in almost every imaginable direction in the centuries that followed. There were few subjects over which more polemical ink was spilt in the turbulent 17th century as states zig-zagged between various political models, ranging from those that sat uneasily within the Bodinian scheme, like the Swiss Confederation or the United Provinces of the Netherlands, to those, such as France, where the king’s sovereignty appeared as indivisible as a point in geometry.