Word: bodin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week's U.N. story starts, properly, with a bearded, 16th Century Frenchman called Jean Bodin, who believed in witchcraft, numerology, astronomy a"nd national sovereignty...
...began a career as a political pundit when a Master of the Mint declared that prices had not risen in France in three centuries. Bodin answered in a sizzling pamphlet showing that in fact prices were going up & up, and God only knew where they would end. After that, he digressed from economics (publishing a treatise on witchcraft called the Demonomania of Sorcerers), and went on to six volumes of political theory, his major work, in which he set down the notion that the state is supreme and inviolable as a matter of natural right. That right, he said, springs...
More. & more people agreed with Bodin until states became so strong that citizens began to limit state powers by bills of rights and, more recently, to attempt to modify sovereignty by international organization...
...Russian position in Paris last week, on which the issue of war or peace heavily depended, had less to do with Marx and Lenin than with Jean Bodin. It was in large measure a pigheaded defense of natsionalny suverenitet unlimited...
...religious wars and persecutions that flourised Bodin's lifetime were a compelling argument for the supreme state. Bodin himself thrice switched sides between Catholics and Protestans and still found no safety. He was almost killed during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre...