Jean Bodin's Police State

Abstract This article probes the meanings of and distinctions between the concepts of the state, sovereignty, and government, as elaborated by Jean Bodin. There is tendency for one of these three terms to disappear in modern analyses of his work. I argue that Bodin makes the state the name of an insubstantial substantive: the condition of a civil condition that must always be qualified by an adjective stating the location of sovereignty as opposed to government. The article then considers the concept of la police in Bodin's work. Although the term is normally understood to mean “government,” I maintain that one of the ways Bodin uses the term is to designate something like “polish.” Bodin provides further textual support for a classical sociological theory about the pacification of society that proceeded alongside the rise of the modern sovereign state.