d the law of war of the Italian, Albericus Gentilis, at his death
professor in Oxford (_De Jure Belli_, 1588). Common to these three was
the advocacy of religious tolerance, from which atheists alone were to
be excepted; common, also, their ethical standpoint in opposition to
Machiavelli, while they are at one with him in regard to the liberation of
political and legal science from theology and the Church. With Gentilis
(1551-1611) this separation assigns the first five commandments to divine,
and the remainder to human law, the latter being based on the laws of human
nature (especially the social impulse). In place of this derivation of law
and the state from the nature of man, Jean Bodin (1530-96) insists on an
historical interpretation; endeavors, though not always with success, to
give sharp definitions of political concepts;[1] rejects composite
state forms, and among the three pure forms, monarchy, aristocracy, and
democracy, rates (hereditary) monarchy the highest, in which the subjects
obey the laws of the monarch, and the latter the laws of God or of nature
by respecting the freedom and the property of the citizens. So far, no
one has correctly distinguished between forms of the state and modes of
administration. Even a democratic state may be governed in a monarchical
or aristocratic way. So far, also, there has been a failure to take into
account national peculiarities and differences of situation, conditions to
which legislation must be adjusted. The people of the temperate zone are
inferior to those of the North in physical power and inferior to those of
the South in speculative ability, but superior to both in political gifts
and in the sense of justice. The nations of the North are guided by
force, those of the South by religion, those between the two by reason.
Mountaineers love freedom. A fruitful soil enervates men, when less
fertile, it renders them temperate and industrious.

[Footnote 1: What is the state? What is sovereignty? The former is defined
as the rational and supremely empowered control over a number of families
and of whatever is common to them; the latter is absolute and continuous
authority over the state, with the right of imposing laws without being
bound by them. The prince, to whom the sovereignty has been unconditionally
relinquished by the people in the contract of submission, is accountable to
God alone.]

Attention has only recently been called (by O. Gierke, in the work already