ABSTRACT
The account of sovereignty in the work of Jean Bodin was a major event in the development of European political thought. But Bodin's account of sovereignty was also the source of much confusion, since he was primarily responsible for introducing the seductive but erroneous notion that sovereignty is indivisible. This chapter explains how Bodin's theory of sovereignty came about and how his confusion as to indivisibility was cleared up in the course of the debate on the locus of sovereignty in the German Empire. In Bodin's design, the basis for comparing states, and explaining their schemes of public law, was to determine and describe the locus of sovereignty in each. Bodin's attempt to show that distribution must be futile as a scheme of mixture thus seems to start by holding that all other powers would be in conflict with the power to make law.
