Absolutism

Absolutism is the political theory and practice that a ruler, almost always a monarch, should hold complete and undivided sovereign authority. Under absolutism the ruler makes law, commands the army, controls taxation and appoints officials without needing consent from a parliament, independent courts or the people. Absolutism was the dominant form of government in much of Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Its defenders argued that a single, supreme authority was the best protection against civil war, religious conflict and aristocratic disorder. Most absolutist thinkers still held that the king was bound by divine and natural law, even if no human institution could enforce those limits.

The French jurist Jean Bodin argued in his Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) that every state needs a single, perpetual and absolute sovereign power. Writing after the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan (1651) that people escape a violent state of nature only by submitting to an absolute sovereign. King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, wrote in defense of the divine right of kings, and in France Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet argued that royal power was sacred and came from God. The reign of Louis XIV of France (1643 to 1715) is usually seen as the model of absolutist rule, with a centralized administration, a large standing army and nobles drawn into court life at Versailles. In England, conflict between Crown and Parliament led to civil war in the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which limited royal power.

Divine right absolutism rested on religious arguments. Hobbesian absolutism rested on secular reasoning about security. Enlightened absolutism in the eighteenth century, associated with Frederick II of Prussia, Catherine II of Russia and Joseph II of Austria, kept unlimited royal power but used it to pursue reforms in law, education, religious toleration and administration. Russian autocracy under the tsars lasted into the twentieth century.

John Locke argued that government rests on the consent of the governed and that subjects may resist a ruler who violates their rights. Montesquieu argued that liberty requires the separation of powers. Critics argue that absolutism left subjects without protection against arbitrary taxation, imprisonment and religious persecution, such as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which removed legal toleration for French Protestants. Some historians also argue that absolutism was never as complete in practice as in theory, since kings depended on nobles, local institutions and church cooperation.

Absolutist states built many features of the modern state: professional armies, permanent bureaucracies, centralized taxation and royal academies. The French Revolution of 1789 began the end of absolutism in Western Europe, and the remaining absolute monarchies gradually gave way to constitutional forms. Today a few states, such as Saudi Arabia, are often described as absolute monarchies.