Milestones of Science Books

BODIN, Jean.

De republica libri sex, Latine ab autore redditi, multo quam antea locupletiores.

Paris: Jaques du Puys, 1586.

1st Edition. Soft cover. Very Good. Item #002682

Folio (348 x 220 mm). [8], 779 [1], 60 pp. Ttitle with large engraved device, ornamental headpieces and initials, index bound at end. Contemporary limp vellum with yapp edges, spine lettered in ink (vellum soiled and browned, some creasing to covers, tears in yapp edges). Light even browning througout, a few ink spots, occasional ink and crayon markings, minor spotting in places, worm tracks in top margin of few leaves well outside text. Provenance: Giorgio Enrico Levi (armorial bookplate to front pastedown and shelf-mark label to first flyleaf recto). A handsome, wide-margined copy in unrestored contemporary binding. ----

Adams B2228; PMM 94 (first French edition). FIRST LATIN EDITION of Bodin's most significant work The Six Books of the Commonwealth (Les Six livres de la République) first published in French in 1576, which represents the summation of legal and political thought of the French Renaissance. It is "the first modern attempt to create a complete system of political science. Its basis was the Politics of Aristotle .., and it was through Bodin that Aristotle's work came to exercise the influence on modern political thinking which has made him the father of modern democracy. Bodin was not content merely to reproduce his master, however; he added considerably from his own experience. Although like most sixteenth-century writers he approved of absolute government, he demanded its control by constitutional laws, in which respect he foreshadowed the development during the seventeenth century of the idea of the 'social contract' .. Thus Bodin was the first to set out clearly the argument round which most political discussion centred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that law is merely an expression of the sovereign will, but that where this reposes in an absolute monarch, it must be mitigated by a customary or natural law. When the lawgiver's law becomes unjust, it ceases to be valid and must be resisted." (PMM 94).

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