Bodin now : or, what is wrong with intellectual history?

Abstract

As we write, the demand for justice of Black Lives Matter rings in the ears of the academy: pull down the statues, decolonize the canon! Seemingly against that grain, especially for scholars of racism, we are nonetheless publishing this collection of articles on one of the towering figures of white privileged male Western thought: Jean Bodin (1529/1530–1596), the French philosopher, jurist, historian, economist, whose definition of sovereignty as the power of the State was one of the defining contributions to political thought in occidental Europe in the midst of its bloody civil wars, and the beginnings of colonialism overseas. How can our publication be justified at this moment?