ABSTRACT
Jean Bodin's principle of sovereignty, as finally stated in the Republique, is the assertion that there must exist, in every ordered commonwealth, a single center of supreme authority and that this authority must necessarily be absolute. This proposition is presented as an analytic truth. By the very concept of a political order, a sovereign authority exists and must be absolute as well as indivisible. The generally accepted rule that sovereignty could not be alienated had been ambiguous in medieval jurisprudence. Thus one of Bodin's favourite arguments for indivisibility is based on the very simple observation that if a sovereign prince should share his power with a subject, he would no longer have the status of a sovereign: Thus all agree that royal rights cannot be ceded, are inalienable, and cannot be prescribed by any tract of time. Given the conventions of the time, his inadvertence was natural enough.
