Political theory is an amphibious beast with one foot in the changing stream of history and another on the enduring ground of human nature and the human condition. Jean Bodin’s theory of absolute and undivided sovereignty was a product of time and place. His Six livres de la République (1576) was written four years after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, during which thousands of prominent Huguenots were killed by the Catholic League a few days after the marriage of Margaret of Valois to Henri of Navarre, a Protestant who later converted to Catholicism when he ascended the...