Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net.

Today's episode, one to rule them all, Jean Baudin.

When I was growing up, we had it drummed into us in Syphex class that the key to the American political system is the separation of powers.

The executive, legislative, and judiciary branches have different spheres of competence, and can also check the power of the other spheres, as when the president nominates Supreme Court justices and Congress gets to approve or reject these nominations.

Back in high school, this was presented to us as a perfectly balanced and calibrated scheme.

There was no talk of, say, FDR threatening to pack the Supreme Court to get it to stop thwarting his agenda.

Nor did we learn that Congress might just refuse to consider Supreme Court nominations from a president, with little more justification than, you can't make us so there.

This would happen later in my lifetime, when Republicans refused to consider a nomination made by Barack Obama, which was a pretty shocking abuse of power, but not an unprecedented one, as a similarly dubious procedure was also used back in the mid 19th century.

American history has always shown how difficult it is to maintain a stable separation of powers, as each branch constantly works to tip the balance in its favor.

Jean Baudin would have said that it is more than difficult in practical terms, it's conceptually impossible.

Sovereignty cannot be divided, because there must be an answer to the question whose commands are final.

As he says in his pioneering work of political theory, the six books of the Commonwealth, the situation in which power is genuinely divided, would be one in which disagreements could be decided only by force.

Power can be delegated by the sovereign authority, but it remains vested in that authority and is exercised in the sovereign's name.

Now, this sovereign doesn't necessarily need to be a single person.

It could be the people as a whole, as in a democracy, or the class of the nobility, as in an aristocracy.

Baudin acknowledges the possibility of these forms of constitution, but argues that the best form is a monarchy in which the single power of the sovereign is held by a single man.

And it should indeed be a man.

Baudin approves of the French-Salact law that excludes women from the line of succession, and thinks that, along with a rule of hereditary inheritance of the throne, this will best serve the goal of political civility.

Of course, Baudin lived under a monarchy, and as a trained lawyer was steeped in the political and legal thought of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, which typically endorsed royalist forms of government.

But it's not like he was unaware of other options. He was also a historian, who knew that aristocracy and democracy were not just theoretical possibilities, but states that had existed in other places and times.

Furthermore, he understood that his own concept of unified and absolute sovereignty was a controversial one.

At this very time, as we just saw in the previous episode, Calvinist political treatises were pushing the idea that the ruler serves at the pleasure of the citizens who elected him.

...