In the seventeenth century, a major group of European thinkers promoted a notion of power as “absolute and unitary.” One purpose of these claims was to justify the growing centralization of governmental authority within different European nations. The most important of these thinkers were 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 exclusively by one authority and could not be divided among other lesser authorities. Bodin, in fact, rejected the very idea of ​​a lesser authority, arguing that the power and authority of a sovereign "cannot be surrendered or alienated": "Just as God, the great sovereign, cannot make a God equal to Himself because it is infinite and logical necessity... two infinities cannot exist, therefore we can say that the prince, who we have taken in the image of God, cannot make a subject equal to himself without annih...