Contribution of Jean Bodin, Hugo Grotius, Jeremy Bentham

Three writers, three countries, three centuries apart in influence — a French jurist watching his country tear itself apart in religious war, a Dutch lawyer trying to civilise war between nations, and an English reformer trying to make law scientific. Between them they built almost the entire vocabulary this module uses for sovereignty.

In two minutes

Jean Bodin gave sovereignty its first explicit, systematic statement as the supreme, undivided power to make law; Hugo Grotius carried the idea into relations between States, subjecting even sovereigns to a law of nations; and Jeremy Bentham's account of a habitually-obeyed sovereign fed directly into the command theory of law that John Austin later made famous.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Political Science – I: Political Theory and Political Organisation on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.