Jean Bodin’s Demonic Constitutionalism: Sovereignty, Natural Law, and Political Theology

It is commonly assumed that the “classical” concept of sovereignty, bequeathed by Jean Bodin, stands in tension with fundamental commitments of liberal modernity, including cosmopolitanism and the aspiration to establish a global legal order. We argue, in contrast, that Bodin’s theory of sovereignty presupposes a universal legal order that imposes binding and enforceable constraints on sovereigns. To substantiate this claim, we examine Bodin’s curious assertion that God, the sovereign ruler of the cosmos, employs a celestial government or administration of angels and demons to enforce His laws. By situating Bodin’s earlier political works alongside his later religious and philosophical writings, we demonstrate that his political thought was neither “absolutist” nor “constitutionalist,” in the ordinary sense of those terms; rather, he was a theorist of what we propose to call “demonic constitutionalism.”