Frederick the Great and the Problem of Raison d’état

Abstract

The political doctrines of modern absolutism derive from Jean Bodin. In his work De Republica of 1575 he defined the majesty of the King as ‘the whole of the powers which are free of the laws to which the citizens are subject’. These demands arose from the complete disorder of the sixteenth-century French political system, with its weakness, religious war and persecutions by the Church. Bodin sought to introduce royal absolutism as a remedy against internal and foreign dangers. The royal sovereignty was described by him as a power ‘indivisible and free of any restriction’. To be sure, the royal power was not entirely unlimited; the king would become a tyrant if he put aside the natural and the divine law and made the subjects into ‘slaves’. Though the age saw a continual interchange of ideas and actual practices in considerable confusion, and though there was opposition to these ideas from the camp of the Monarchomachen,‡ absolute sovereignty prevailed, and to it France owed her recovery from the depths of ruin.

Lecture delivered at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1971, under the chairmanship of Professor Ragnhild Hatton. First published in English in Frederick the Great and the Making of Prussia, ed. and trans. Thomas M. Barker (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972) pp. 67–80.

First published in English in Enlightened Despotism: Reform or Reaction?, ed. and trans. Roger Wines (Boston, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1967) pp. 10–13, in the series ‘Problems in European Civilization’.