In the 17th century, a prominent group of European thinkers favored a notion of power that was "both absolute and unitary." One purpose of these assertions was to justify the ever-increasing centralization of governmental authority within several European nations. Among these thinkers, we especially include Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin. Bodin's Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) offered the enduring definition of sovereignty as "the absolute and perpetual power of a Commonwealth" which "is limited neither in power, nor in function, nor in duration." In other words, sovereignty was held by a single authority and could not be distributed among other lesser authorities. Indeed, Bodin rejected the very idea of ​​lesser authority, asserting that the power and authority of a sovereign "cannot be abandoned or alienated": "Just as God, the great sovereign, cannot make a God equal to himself because he is infinite and infinite. logical necessity... two infinities cannot exist, we can therefore say that the prince, whom we have taken as the image of God, cannot make a subject equal to himself without anything....