Harmony, Politics and Utopia in the Cosmology of Jean Bodin and Johannes Kepler

Abstract

This paper explores Harmonice Mundi as a political text and considers the influence on Kepler of the French political theorist Jean Bodin (1530–1596). Both Bodin and Kepler subscribed to the political cosmology inherited from Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, and elaborated in detail by Claudius Ptolemy, in which the terrestrial state was part of a wider entity including the celestial spheres and the use of the planets to identify changes in the quality of time and fluctuations in natural influences. Both sought to remedy failures in contemporary astrology and create a new and empirical discipline which could avert future crises by predicting them. The paper examines Bodin’s theories and then locates the work of both him and Kepler as attempts to establish ways to create stability in the unstable politics of the post-Reformation era, and contextualises Kepler’s attempts to delineate the perfect state as utopian.