Abstract
While writers in ancien régime France did not use the word absolutisme to describe their government, apologists for the great revolution during the decade of the 1790s found this neologism to be an accurate assessment of the monarchical political order that was overthrown by a newly liberated and enlightened people.1 Indeed French absolutism was in some respects ‘defined to fit the case of Louis XIV, making the word synonymous with the alleged innovations and policies of one man, instead of regarding it as ‘a broad historic phenomenon’.2 The word first made its appearance in England even later, in the radical literature of the 1830s.3 But in seventeenth-century England, doctrines of absolute sovereignty were very often associated by its critics with the narrow power-seeking interests of the Stuart monarchy and the privileged clergy in the state-supported Church of England. In either case monarchical absolutism was pejoratively linked with unlimited power, tyranny, despotism, fanaticism, the rule of one against the interests of the many. Until recently some historians have been willing to accept the harsh judgement registered by the French revolutionaries and English radicals against the first promoters of the idea of absolutism, while accepting the notion that absolutist forms of government enjoyed their definitive flowering in the seventeenth century.
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Notes and References
Quoting Herbert H. Rowen, ‘Louis XIV and Absolutism’ in John C. Rule (ed.), Louis XIV and the Craft of Kingship (Columbus, OH, 1969), p. 303.
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974).
See also James Anderson and Stuart Hill, ‘Absolutism and Other Ancestors’, in Anderson (ed.), The Rise of the Modern State (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1986), p. 29.
Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 187.
Bodin, The Six Books of a Commonweal, trans. Richard Knolles (London, 1606), ed. K. D. McRae (Cambridge, MA, 1962), p. 84.
Nanerl Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ, 1980), p. 18;
Francis Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant and Order (Ithaca, NY, 1984), p. 93.
Harrington, Oceana, in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977), p. 264.
Quoted in Roland Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598–1789, 2 vols, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1979–84), 2:657.
For coverage of these issues, see Richard Bonney, Political Change in France under Richelieu and Mazarin, 1624–1661 (Oxford, 1978);
Geoffrey Treasure, Cardinal Richelieu and the Development of Absolutism (New York, 1972).
Philip Longworth, ‘The Emergence of Absolutism in Russia’, in Miller (ed.), Absolutism, pp. 175–93. See also Longworth, Alexis, Tsar of all the Russias (New York, 1984),
and Paul Dukes, The Making of Russian Absolutism, 1613–1801 (New York, 1982), pp. 1–58.
G. Durand, ‘What is Absolutism’, in Ragnhild Hatton (ed.), Louis XIV and Absolutism (Columbus, OH, 1976), pp. 19–21;
Herbert W. Rowan, ‘Kingship and Republicanism in the Seventeenth Century’, in Charles H. Carter (ed.), From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation (New York, 1965), p. 424.
Wootton, Divine Right, p. 24. For background on this period see, more generally, Derik Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England, 1603–1658 (New York, 1986)
and J. P. Kenyon, Stuart England (Harmondsworth, 1978).
Kiernan, State and Society, p. 30. See also Henry Kamen, Golden Age Spain (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1988), pp. 37–49.
For a useful discussion of Spain’s position relative to the other great powers at this juncture, see Paul Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1989), pp. 31–72.
Margaret Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution, 1603–1645 (New York, 1964, first published 1949), p. 138.
W. H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism and Politics (Oxford, 1964), p. 53.
See also Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (London, 1992), p. 132.
C. V. Wedgewood, Strafford, 1593–1641 (London, 1935), p. 75.
Quoting Antony Black, Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy (Cambridge, 1970), p. 1.
Francisco Suarez, A Defense of the Catholic and Apostolic Faith against the Errors of the Anglican Sect (1612) in Selections from Three Works, 2 vols, trans. G. L. Williams (Oxford, 1944), 2:697.
James I, The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles H. MacIlwain (New York, 1965, first published 1946), p. 74.
William of Ockham, ‘Eight Questions on the Power of the Pope’, in Ockham, A Letter to the Friars Minor and Other Writings, ed. A. S. McGrade, trans. John Kilcullen (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 303–33.
Roland Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry IV, trans. Joan Spencer (New York, 1973), pp. 161–2.
Judson, Crisis, p. 149. Cf. Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven, CT, 1996), esp. ch.2.
Quoted in J. H. Shennan, Government and Society in France, 1461–1661 (New York, 1969), pp. 82–3.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1965), 1.1.
Bossuet, Politics Drawn from the Very Word of Holy Scripture, ed. and trans. Patrick Riley (Cambridge, 1990), p. 61.
J. M. Kelly, A Short History of Western Legal Theory (Oxford, 1992), pp. 57–8.
Cicero, De Legibus, trans. C. W. Keys (Cambridge, MA, 1961, first published 1928), 1.6.18–19.
Kelly, Western Legal Theory, p. 103. See also Donald R. Kelley, The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1990), pp. 68–9.
Bernice Hamilton, Political Thought in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Oxford, 1963), pp. 28–9.
J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (New York, 1986), pp. 14–15; Friedrich, Age of the Baroque, p. 22.
Preston King, The Ideology of Order: a Comparative Analysis of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes (New York, 1974), p. 73.
Kenneth D. McRae (ed.), The Six Books of a Republic (Cambridge, MA, 1962), p. A63.
Richard Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth, ed. William Lamont (Cambridge, 1994), p. 124.
Bodin, Six Books, in Julian Franklin (ed.), Bodin On Sovereignty (Cambridge, 1992), p. 86.
Julian Franklin (trans, and ed.), Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, and Mornay (New York, 1969), pp. 16–17.
Locke, Two Treatises, 2:200. Robert Zaller, ‘The Tyrant in English Revolutionary Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 54 (1993), 589–590.
Johann P. Sommerville, ‘James I and the divine right of Kings’, in Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 58–9.
Johann P. Sommerville (ed.), King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge, 1994), pp. xv–xviii.
Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, in J.P. Sommerville (ed.), Patriarcha and Other Writings (Cambridge, 1991), p. 2.
Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (New York, 1975), pp. 63, 73; Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, p. 27.
Patrick Riley (ed.), Politics Drawn from the Very Word of Holy Scripture (Cambridge, 1991), p. xv.
Christopher Hill, The Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1994), p. 20.
Saravia quoted in Johan P. Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (London, 1992), p. 83.
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© 1998 W. M. Spellman
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Spellman, W.M. (1998). Contours of Absolute Monarchy. In: European Political Thought 1600–1700. European Culture and Society. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27200-6_3
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