Absolutism

Although it need not refer only to monarchical rule, absolutism usually refers to royal absolutism. The rise and peak of the age of royal absolutism is usually located in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, particularly in France and among [Page 3]such men as Jean Bodin, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and Louis XIV. The term absolutism, however, entered political discourse only in the eighteenth century, a century sometimes associated with enlightened absolutism. Absolutism is essentially a doctrine about the absence of limits to royal power. It is not, strictly speaking, a doctrine about the origins of royal power: Although absolutist claims were often tied to the doctrine of the divine right of kings, they were also compatible with some variants of contractarianism. Like arguments for constitutionalism or limited government, absolutist arguments have many of their roots in the discourse of canonists and Romanists regarding papal and imperial power.

At its simplest, absolutism claimed the completeness of royal power and the independence of royal power from human limits: The king was bound by God's laws and nature's laws but not by human laws. Subjects were bound to obey the king's commands and to not actively resist royal power exercised in conformity with divine law. Institutionally, the doctrine of absolutism aimed to free royal power from supervision by, or subjection to, other human powers, including royal subjects, estates, parliaments, the hereditary nobility, and the church. Conceptually, however, absolutists insisted on the distinction between absolute royal power and arbitrary, despotic, or tyrannical power. A proper monarch respected the property of his or her subjects and even the fundamental laws of the land (although these could be interpreted rather minimally and as strengthening royal power). In this conceptual aspect, Hobbes stands at the limits of absolutist thought.

While it is important to situate absolutism in contrast to constitutionalism, it is also important to grasp the emergence of absolutism, and absolutist discourse, within the broader context of the rise of the state in a European system of states. In the fifteenth century, and perhaps before, national kingdoms invoked Latin maxims such as princeps legibus solutus est (The prince is not bound by the laws) and rex imperator in regno suo est (The king is emperor in his own kingdom) as they sought to undermine the universalist claims of the empire and papacy. Indeed, the very idea of sovereignty, so central to the modern conception of the state, was not systematically addressed until Bodin. Consequently, it is also important to relate absolutism to the emergence of raison d'état and to such thinkers as Machiavelli.