Pombal: the Paradox of Enlightenment and Despotism

Abstract

The Anglo-American historical tradition tends to assume that the eighteenth century is synonymous with the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment with liberty: especially those liberties enshrined in the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, rights which have as their fundamental objective the protection of the individual from the state. But in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, the Enlightenment was more often married to Absolutism than to Constitutionalism. Here it was not the individual seeking protection from the state, but the state seeking protection from overpowerful individuals. Marc Raeff has gone so far as to characterise the legal formulations of eighteenth-century reformism in the German territories and Russia as being aimed at the creation of ‘a well-ordered police state’. And indeed state is the operative word; certainly in Portugal also.

‘Small powers need much more than great powers to take carefully considered action, because the first do not have the resources to repair the errors they make, whereas the latter always have the means to recuperate.’ (Instructions of D. Luis da Cunha to M. A. de Azeredo Coutinho [1738]).