Jean Bodin: The Paradox of Sovereignty and the Privatization of Religion

Jean Bodin: The Paradox of Sovereignty and the Privatization of Religion

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Description

Liberal beliefs about the proper relation among law, morality, and religion first acquired distinct contours during the wars of religion that ravaged France between 1562 and 1598. While recent commentators on the state's obligatory “neutrality” toward conflicting moral ideals often refer to this bloodily traumatic period, they usually do so only in passing. We can shed considerable light, however, upon our constitutionally mandated separation of political and religious spheres as well as upon the uneasy relation between law and morals typical of the liberal tradition if we exhume and reexamine one deeply influential argument for religious toleration advanced in late sixteenth-century France.

Source Publication

Religion, Morality, and the Law: Nomos XXX

Source Editors/Authors

J. Roland Pennock, John W. Chapman

Publication Date

1988

Jean Bodin: The Paradox of Sovereignty and the Privatization of Religion

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