Absolutism: The Doctrine of Absolute Rule

Introduction

Absolutism is the political idea that a ruler should hold supreme, undivided power, answerable to no parliament, court or people. It shaped much of Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries, and its most famous embodiment was Louis XIV of France, the “Sun King”.

Hyacinthe Rigaud, 1701, Louvre, public domain

The Theory

Absolutism had several kinds of defenders. The French jurist Jean Bodin, in his Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576), argued that sovereignty is by its nature undivided: a state needs one final authority. Others appealed to the divine right of kings — that monarchs receive their power directly from God and answer to God alone — a view set out by James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) and the French bishop Bossuet.

Thomas Hobbes made the most powerful case without relying on God at all. Without a government, he argued, life would be a war of all against all; rational people would therefore agree to hand almost unlimited power to a sovereign who could keep the peace.

“…and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. 13

British Library, 1651, public domain

Absolutism in Practice

• Louis XIV of France (reigned 1643–1715) tamed the nobility by drawing it to his court at Versailles and ruled without calling the national assembly. The famous line “L’État, c’est moi” (“I am the state”) is almost certainly apocryphal, but it captures how his reign was seen.
• Peter the Great of Russia (1682–1725) used absolute power to force rapid modernisation.
• “Enlightened absolutists” such as Frederick the Great of Prussia claimed to rule for their subjects’ good; Frederick called himself the “first servant of the state”.

The Challenge

England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 put limits on the crown, and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) argued that government exists to protect people’s rights and may be resisted when it violates them. Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748) called for separating legislative, executive and judicial power. The French Revolution of 1789 swept the old absolutism away, and these ideas went on to shape modern constitutions.

A Different Absolutism

In ethics, “absolutism” means something else: the view that some moral rules hold without exception, whatever the consequences — never torture an innocent, never lie. This moral absolutism, often associated with Kant and with natural-law thinking, is the version set against other schools in the Contradiction Engine: Schools.

Illustration: one standard over all — political absolutism rests it in a ruler, moral absolutism in unbreakable rules

Further Reading

Absolute monarchy on Wikipedia · Moral absolutism on Wikipedia