Sovranità e dominio nella République di Jean Bodin

  Abtract. This article aims to pose the problem of the relationship between State and Sovereignty in Jean Bodin. In the second half of the Sixteenth Century and then in the Seventeenth Century, Sovereignty was understood as an external principle, presupposed to the existence of political association. Classical terminology then remains. Only when Sovereignty appears as an internal, constitutive element of the Political Body, will the term State permanently take the place of the conceptuality inherited from tradition. Only in this specific phase of its historical conceptual development does the State appear as a reality that exists in itself. Consequently, political science will become the Theory of the State. Certainly not therefore in Bodin’s political thought.