CITIZENSHIP AS SHARED SUBJECTION
Bodin’s first major discussion of the theory of citizenship occurs in an early work, a treatise on the method of historical writing, the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, first published in 1566.
Chapter VI of theMethodus - by far the longest of the entire work - functioned as a largely stand-alone political treatise on the concept of the state (which he indicated by the term respublica) and its constituent parts, and foreshadowed ideas that Bodin would later develop fully in his most well-known work of legal and political theory, Les Six Livres de la Republique, first published in 1576. But Bodin’s theory of citizenship initially emerged, as with so many other areas of Bodin’s political thought, as a more general criticism of Aristotle’s political philosophy.[290] Thus it is in this intellectual context that we must first situate the reasons for Bodin’s entry into the discussion of citizenship and, more significantly, why he turned to the Roman experience of citizenship.In the Methodus, Bodin presents an analysis of citizenship that is framed explicitly as a criticism of the classical Aristotelian treatment in the Politics. Citing Book III of the Politics, Bodin observes that “Aristotle defined a citizen as one who may share in the administration of justice, may hold office, or act in a deliberative capacity.”[291] For Aristotle and for others who followed his influential analysis, citizenship was to be understood in terms of active participation in the public life of the polis - and so, Aristotle famously declares, “what effectively distinguishes the citizen proper from all others is his participation in giving judgment and in holding office.”[292]
As Bodin pointed out, this analysis was taken up with keen favor by Renaissance readers of Aristotle, and he singled out by name Gasparo Contarini, Carolo Sigonius, and Girolamo Garimberto.[293] For Bodin, it was Aristotle who caused all of these thinkers to be, as he put it, in errorem.
Indeed, from his point of view, it was not at all clear how anyone could be justified in following the Aristotelian analysis. This is because citizenship, according to the Aristotelian theory, was really only a phenomenon of democratic states and thus was “suited only to popular rule” - specifically, the kind of popular rule to be found in a democratic polis such as “Athens and in the time of Pericles.”[294] In this respect, the Aristotelian theory of citizenship dealt only with particulars, not with universals - and consequently, it could not serve as the basis for a truly universal history or civil science. Aristotle failed to explain practices of citizenship in more general terms, far outside the classical context of the Athenian polis - let alone early modern states.[295]The major shortcoming of the Aristotelian theory, Bodin suggests, is that it fails to explain the practices of citizenship in states outside the Greek context of the democratic polis, the most important classical example of which was, for Bodin, the Roman Empire. To illustrate his point, Bodin asks whether the classical Aristotelian analysis could make any sense of the notion of citizenship expressed in the Antonine Constitution, a noteworthy counterexample and test case to contrast with Aristotle. He asks: “What is to be done in the case of Emperor Antonine, who in a proclamation ordered that all free men...should be Roman citizens?”[296] For Bodin, Aristotle’s theory of citizenship in the polis was fundamentally flawed for two critical reasons. First, Aristotle could not explain the civil status of Roman provincials following the universal grant of citizenship in the Antonine Constitution. As he argues, if we were to follow Aristotle’s analysis, free inhabitants of Roman provinces “were aliens because they had been denied popular rights...[i. e., they were] debarred from honors, judicial matters, and public counsels” - a result he described as both “absurd and dangerous.’[297] It was absurd because Aristotle’s analysis allows individuals to be “partly citizens” [partim cives] and “partly foreigners” [partim peregrinos].[298] And it was dangerous, because harboring such a large domestic population of disenfranchised outsiders could function as “an excellent pretext for civil war.”[299] From an Aristotelian point of view, they held the unenviable and uncertain position of “exiles or strangers in their own cities [in sua civitate exules aut peregrini∖." like members of an underclass in Athens.
So clearly, for Bodin, there was an urgent need to critically revise the theory of citizenship.For Bodin, the root of the problem was conceptual: Aristotle “never defined the supreme authority” of the state - the sovereign imperium, which, according to Bodin, every independent state must by (his) definition have.[300] It is the sovereign power that unites the various elements of the state and creates a civic unity out of a natural plurality. More important, it is the sovereign power that creates citizens by subjecting free persons [i. e., non-slaves] to its supreme authority. In short, for Bodin, it was subjection to imperium that made a free person a citizen - not the exercise of political or civil rights as imagined by the Aristotelians. Bodin articulates this new definition of citizenship first in the Methodus where he writes, ?A citizen is one who enjoys the common liberty and the protection of authority.’14 The definition in the De Republica essentially continues this earlier analysis, but stresses the thought that citizenship was primarily and essentially a condition of subjection under a sovereign authority. And so he writes that ?the citizen is nothing other than a free man under obligation to the sovereign power of another.’15
In offering his own definition of citizenship, Bodin explained that Aristotle (and his followers) committed the error of trying to define something in terms of its accidental, rather than essential, attributes. In this case, they tried to define citizenship by identifying it with certain attributes, rights, or powers associated with citizenship, all of which can be highly variable. Such attributes were, as he put it, not essential but purely “casuall and accidentarie.”16 This, then, was Aristotle’s mistake: he identified citizenship essentially with certain attributes of active political participation that were really only contingent. Athenian citizens just happened to participate actively in the public offices of the polis, but Aristotle’s mistake was to identify these functions of political participation as the defining feature of citizenship - what Bodin called “privileges” - so that he could make the simplistic statement that he who was eligible to hold office, give judgment, or deliberate was ipso facto a citizen.
But for Bodin, it should not matter one bit for ascertaining citizenship whether one is fully entitled to participate in the civil affairs of one’s state, or whether one is fully disenfranchised from civil rights. The only essential criterion in identifying a citizen is shared subjection under one common authority [esse sub unum & idem imperium subjecta]. Indeed, if citizens of a state can be said to share anything at all, it is only this fact of subjection and nothing else - not even the mutual sharing of common privileges or capacities for political participation - that generates a common identity. Such shared subjection just is what carves out a citizen-body out of nature, and, more important, it is what differentiates the citizen from the foreigner.17
But beyond this essential requirement of common subjection, citizens need not share anything else in common with each other. This is an important point worth stressing in Bodin’s conception of citizenship in the well-ordered commonwealth, not least because Bodin’s vision of citizenship - unlike Aristotelian citizenship - al-
best suited for each form of state, such as his argument that only a ?harmonic’ balance or mixture of aristocratic and popular government is best for the lawful government of a monarchy.
14 Bodin 1566, 155: Civis autem qui communi libertate fruitur, ac imperii tutela.
15 Bodin 1586, 73: Est autem civis nihil aliud quam liber homo, qui summae alterius potestati obligatur.
16 Bodin 1606, 64.
17 Bodin 1566, 161: Peregrinos igitur a civibus hac ratione potissimum distinguemus, quod hi vel patriae imperiis acquiescant, vel alieno imperio se subiciant & accipiantur. lows for a remarkably wide degree of diversity in the citizenry. It was a vision of membership in the state that hearkened back not to Athens, but indeed to Rome.
In the Methodus, Bodin stresses his central thesis that subjection under one imperium is the only thing shared in common by citizens of a respublica by highlighting, as points of contrast, the many things that citizens do not necessarily need to share with each other.
Arguing against the Ciceronian doctrine articulated in De Re Publica that membership of a respublica is chiefly identified by shared consent to, and use of, law [iuris consensu], Bodin insists that the shared use of a single set of laws and customs is not necessary to make a unitary respublica, a point he illustrates by giving the examples of the early Romans (who freely used Greek laws and customs) as well as the example of the Turks (who, though they had no common system of law, nevertheless were uniformly citizens of one state because they were all equally subject to one common authority).[301] Since citizens need not share the same laws or legal system, he allows for a wide degree of legal pluralism - the multiplicity of parallel legal systems, traditions, and customs operating simultaneously within the same state.He broadens this same point further in De Republica, by admitting all manners of pluralism in a state, and not just legal pluralism. He observes that, although citizens may “differ among themselves in lawes, language, customes, religions, and diversitie of nations,” they are nevertheless citizens of one and the same commonwealth, “when they are governed by the puissant soveraigntie of one or many rulers.”[302] Thus, he admits quite explicitly not only a legal pluralism of laws and customs within one and the same state, but also linguistic pluralism, cultural pluralism, and most notably (in his age of religious warfare) religious pluralism.[303] For Bodin, such diversity and coexistence of pluralistic sources of identity was fully compatible with his vision of the respublica, united by one common sovereign authority. This is why, for both the historian and the political scientist, an empire of many gentes, languages, and customs - above all, the Roman Empire - could still be treated as one state, rather than as a patchwork of many states.
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