Overcoming the Feudal Society

             Jean Bodin and Jaques Bossuet attack the very foundation of a Feudal society by defining and advocating legitimate political authority as power granted solely to a king, making all other nobility subservient or powerless. Wiesner states that for Jean Bodin "there was nothing divine about governing power. Men created governments solely to ensure their physical and material security... the ruling power had to exercise a sovereignty"(42). Wiesner believes Bodin placed limits on this sovereignty due to natural law and the need to respect property and the family (42). In The Six Books of the Republic, Bodin states that "the first principal of sovereignty is to give laws to the citizens" without these laws being accepted by superiors, equals, or inferiors (46). If the consent of superiors, equals, or inferiors is needed, the authority is shared. In other words. Sovereign power does not exist.
             Weisner explains that Jaques Bossuet expressed what has been called "the divine right theory of kingship: that is, the king was God's deputy on earth, and to oppose him was to oppose divine law" (42). Wiesner further states that Bossuet "backed his political theories with scriptural authority" (43). According to Bossuet in the book Politics Drawn from the very Words of the Holy Scriptures, God is King of Kings. All kings are as his ministers and should heed and learn the lessons which God gives the kings in his scriptures. By means of scripture, a person sees that monarchial government comes from God. God chose a hereditary monarchy, excluding women from the sovereign power (47).
             Bossuet further makes it clear that the royal throne in not the throne of man, but the throne of God himself. Bossuet states that even the prophets revered the kings and looked upon them as associated with the sovereign empire of God, whose authority the kings exercise on earth. The King being as God himself, reli...

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Overcoming the Feudal Society. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 06:22, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/13784.html