The Idea of Absolutism

Abstract

The term ‘absolutism’ entered the language of politics — in French — during the decade after the Revolution in 1789. Its first appearance in English came more than a generation later, in the radical and liberal literature of the years around 1830. The system or concept to which the term referred was of course much older; and there is a sense in which its emergence may be located in the period with which this book is concerned. It was with absolute monarchy that the revolutionary and radical writers of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries were contending, seeing it as the most stubborn obstacle to the achievement of their aims. Absolute monarchy had been the preponderant political system of that ancien régime which was overthrown in 1789 only to reappear, it seemed, in the era of the Holy Alliance after 1815. And it had been the seventeenth century that saw the consolidation of the European states system of the ancien régime. The idea of absolutism does indeed have a wider political application: the sovereignty of Parliament, for instance, is, in juridical terms, an absolute sovereignty recognising, as A. V. Dicey pointed out a century ago, no legal limitations. It is, however, in its application to absolute monarchy that the term has had its greatest historical importance, and it is in this sense that the idea will be analysed here.