The French political theorist Jean Bodin (1530–1596) is well known for being the father of modern theory on sovereignty. According to Foucault, biopower and the absolute sovereign power, which Bodin theorizes on, are two distinct techniques of power. Bodin’s theory on absolute sovereignty has been studied extensively, but his political thought is yet to be examined from the viewpoint of population politics. There seems to be an alternative side to Bodin’s thought that has been left unnoticed by earlier Bodin research. In this paper I argue that Bodin was also a pioneer in the biopolitical questions of population. Bodin did not only pose the modern theory of sovereignty, but he was also a seminal theorist of population politics. He examined issues regarding the quantity and quality of the population in ways that were unusual in his time. My research question is two-pronged. I will be asking on the one hand, in what way and to what extend Bodin can be regarded not only as the father of the modern theory of sovereignty, but also as the father of modern biopolitics. On the other hand I will be asking, how interpreting Bodin as a theorist of biopolitics affects the current views on the history and the theory of biopower. Asking these questions will potentially provide the following contributions to the prevailing theory: (1) a biopolitical point of view to Bodin’s thought, absent from current Bodin research. (2) A perspective to the conversation regarding the relationship between biopower and sovereign power. For example: was the reign of terror exercised by Nazi Germany biopower, sovereign power, some kind of a mixture of these power techniques, or are biopower and sovereign power originally intertwined as Giorgio Agamben claims. (3) A perspective to the discussion concerning the history of biopolitics, in other words, a perspective on the origins of biopower.
