Harmonic Justice

Abstract The fourth, final cause of law in Bodin’s Iuris Universi Distributio was justice. This chapter explores the central place of justice in Bodin’s legal and political thought. Not only did justice tame and regulate sovereignty in his political theory of the sovereign state, Bodin acknowledged the varieties of justice that may be experienced in human conduct. Unlike Aristotle, Bodin’s theory recognized three basic forms of justice, what he called “the three daughters of Themis.” These included commutative justice, modelled on arithmetic equality, and distributive justice, modelled on geometric proportions. Bodin’s favored form, however, was harmonic justice, modelled on Pythagorean harmonic ratios. His vision of social harmony, like voices in a mixed choir, offered a powerful metaphor for his political theory of “harmonic government,” which was the final normative message conveyed in Bodin’s most important work of political theory, the République.