Vattel & Bodin

Here is Vattel's Droit des Gens.  I acquired this text about two years ago, which I used in a seminar for graduate students in Political Theory and the Law School at Berkeley interested in the history of the law of nations.

This copy of Vattel was once in the law library of the Bar Association of the City of New York. Photo: Daniel Lee, 2023.

I spent time with Vattel right around the time I finished my last book on Bodin's legal theory of sovereignty. 

Vattel, Droit des Gens (Amsterdam, 1775).  Photo: Daniel Lee, 2023.

 It was striking to me how much Vattel developed his own analysis of sovereignty with Bodin as his model.  Here's a famous passage in Vattel's Preliminaires to the Droit des Gens:

Vattel, Droit des Gens, Preliminaires §18.  Photo: Daniel Lee, 2023.

This is a famous passage among international lawyers.  This is treated as a major statement of the modern doctrine of 'sovereign equality' - states are legally equal, despite any factual differences in territory, population, GDP, etc.  Vattel:  'A dwarf is as much a man as a giant; likewise a small republic is no less a sovereign state than the most powerful kingdom.'

Vattel often gets credit for articulating sovereign equality in terms of this memorable metaphor of comparing size.  But it is an old metaphor, that can be traced back to the most important theorist of sovereign, Jean Bodin (and probably before that too).  

Here is Bodin on 'sovereign equality':

Jean Bodin, De Republica Libri VI (Paris: Jacques Du Puys, 1591) p. 12 (= 1586: 10; 1583: 13).  Photo: Daniel Lee, 2023.

'Just as an elephant should not be said to be any more of an animal than a mere ant, so should Ragusa, the smallest among almost all the states in Europe, not be said to be any less a state than the empires of the Turks, the Tartars, or even the Spaniards, whose imperial authorities trace the very boundaries of the course of the sun.'

Jean Bodin, Six Livres de la République (Paris: Jacques Du Puys, 1583) p. 13.  Photo: Daniel Lee.

It is at this point that Bodin anticipates Vattel:  'Just as in the enumeration of houses, where a small household is to be counted for one family, as much as the largest and the richest manor in the city, so too is a small king as much a sovereign as the greatest monarch on earth.'

There's much more in my book.  It's all documented in there.

One last thing I'd just mention before finishing this post.  I have several versions of Bodin's République/De Republica.  But the one that is most interesting is this one:

Photo: Daniel Lee, 2023.

Not only is it in very good condition, for a sixteenth-century print book, it is also one of the last editions published during Bodin's lifetime by Bodin's authorized publisher, Jacques Du Puys.

The provenance is also worth mentioning:

Photo: Daniel Lee, 2023.

I bought this from a bookseller in Ottawa.  At the time, I wondered whether this particular book might have had some connection to the great Bodin scholar, Ken McRae, who taught at the University of Ottawa for many years.  And, of course, my suspicions were confirmed when I opened the cover.  I'm glad to keep it 'in the family' of Bodin scholars.