Bodin’s politics concerned consent and class balance, not founding a national state

Evidence

During the civil wars in France, Bodin is the exponent of the third party—the so-called politicians’ party—which defends the viewpoint of national interest, that is to say of an internal balance of classes in which hegemony belongs to the Third Estate through the monarchy. … For Bodin the question is not that of founding the territorially united (national) State—i.e. of going back to the time of Louis XI—but of balancing the conflicting social forces within this already strong and well-implanted State. Bodin is interested in the moment of consent, not in the moment of force. With Bodin there is a tendency to develop the absolute monarchy: the Third Estate is so aware of its strength and its dignity, it knows so well that the fortunes of the absolute monarchy are linked to its own fortunes and its own development, that it poses conditions for its loyalty , it presents demands, tends to limit absolutism. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 645

Categorization

• DEFINE: This establishes Gramsci’s conception of ‘consent’ vs ‘force’ as twin moments of hegemony — here the monarch rules through the consent of a self-confident Third Estate rather than coercion, an early sketch of hegemony’s consensual pole.
• XREF: Directly feeds the hegemony vs domination distinction that later Islamophobia scholarship (e.g. Laclau/Mouffe, Said on Gramsci) inherits — the State as consensual-organising rather than merely coercive.