Politieke theorie en geschiedenis

[p. 127]

The singularity of absolutism^*

In the international discussion among historians of the early modern period in recent years - a discussion which has proved destructive of many traditional concepts from ‘renaissance’ to ‘mercantilism’ - the term ‘absolutism’ has been spared. Absolutism still seems an undisputed historical fact, the defining of which has not given rise to substantial difficulties: it was and is considered to be a historical phenomenon connected with the aggrandisement and the centralisation of the state and with the increase of its power.

As soon as historians start to ‘explain’ absolutism and allocate it its proper place in historical development, however, agreement ceases. Even if the term is reserved for systems of government of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - and some writers are much less exclusive in their use of the label - absolutism is interpreted in mutually contradictory ways as feudal, aristocratic, agrarian, conservative, bourgeois, progressive, despotic, constitutional, monarchical, republican, an attempt to bring a modicum of order out of chaos, an effort to build on the ruins left by a collapsed economy, a triumphant step towards the rational modern state, an impartial and honest form of government, a systematic exploitation of the masses by a very small group of profiteers. Indeed, it would not be difficult for a diligent student of modern historical literature to expand this list considerably. This is not surprising. Anyone well versed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents and printed works can, with the help of a little imagination, construct contrasting interpretations from varying centemporary attitudes. The problem is not so much how to explain the large number of contradictory interpretations, since these have arisen out of ancien régime polemics rather than twentieth-century research; the problem is why we choose to continue thinking along these same lines.

Absolutism was the first political system able to profit from the printing press; it grasped its chance. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a huge number of publications appeared which deal with absolutism. In countless universities lectures, dissertations, disputations, theses and the like were devoted to it. In the law courts specific problems relating to it were defined and redefined. In the churches its religous implications were

* Lijst van publikaties, infra, 490, nr. 81 (1976)

[p. 128]

emphasised and praised in innumerable sermons. For many decades absolutism provided major themes in art and literature, in theatre and music. For the first time in European history since Antiquity the state as such became the object of general discussion and propaganda. Thanks to this fairly massive interest, spread and stimulated by the printing press, a political terminology derived almost wholly from Aristotle, Cicero and the Corpus juris received coherent and readily understandable meaning. It was left to the nineteenth century to transform these terms into abstractions and ‘isms’: not till then did potestas absoluta become absolutism, and potestas mitigata, monarchia mixta, libertas, etc. become liberalism. The essential concepts relating to political organisation were, however, rapidly adopted by all educated or half-educated men and need no translation even today. We still use the same terms. Not only the easy ones, such as monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, plutocracy or autocracy, but many more, as for example popular sovereignty (majestas populi), tyranny, despotism, fundamental rights, fundamental laws, natural law, arbitrary rule, prerogative, raison d'état, coup d'état, were so broadly circulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and proved so extraordinarily useful that they still strike us as much more familiar than the terminology of feudalism.

There may be a danger in this as it can mislead us into taking absolute monarchy and its opponents too much for granted. And that we should not do. We write with effortless ease of the ‘new monarchy’ and the ‘new state’ that took shape in the second half of the fifteenth century and rapidly developed into sixteenth- (and seventeenth-) century absolutism. Yet we realise that those states were ‘modern’ only in the indeed essential but still limited sense of being what we call ‘states’ at all. The aims and methods of their governments were far from modern. Nor were they medieval. In fact they were particular, singular and strange. The state of the ancien régime is a phenomenon sui generis. It is a truism to say that there are no isolated facts in history and nothing prevents us from forging our knowledge of the past into a long chain of continuity. It is pedantic to criticise some historians for linking absolutism - interpreted as a conservative feudal system - with the Middle Ages, and others for interpreting it as a centralising and progressive form of government and thus linking it with the nineteenth century. All I am prepared to argue is that it is also useful to look at absolutism as if it were a strange and dangerous beast, to examine it with caution and to study it as an isolated, short-lived type of state that, with all its glitter and display of power, was largely unsuccessful. There is nothing new in such an approach but it may be salutary to try it again.

That absolutism was short-lived nobody can deny. Fully developed in the seventeenth century in a number of European states, it started decaying in the early eighteenth century and failed in its attempt to adapt itself

[p. 129]

to the Enlightenment. Despite its ostentation and its undeniable success in advertising its wares, it was more ephemeral than medieval monarchy on the one hand and post-revolutionary constitutionalism on the other. This should not surprise us. The distinguishing feature of absolutism is its pretension to rise above reality, to break out of the limitation of history, to transcend the community and the very foundation of political organisation, that is, human beings living together in a group. Absolutism was by definition an abstraction. There has never been another form of government for which its defenders have been bold enough to claim the absolute as its most characteristic quality. This element of intellectual pride and obstinacy weakened absolutism as a system. Not only were governments unable to realise their pretensions - even in the incomparably more sophisticated and better equiped state of the present day no one can rule so absolutely as intellectuals in the seventeenth century thought the monarch ought to do - still more dangerous for them was the fact that in modern times modes of thinking, fashions, philosophies and styles change more rapidly than forms of government, so that to associate a political system closely with a cultural development is to run the very real risk of soon making that system look old-fashioned and thus rendering it unacceptable. This is what happened with absolutism. It was so thoroughly embedded in renaissance and baroque thought, intellectually so dependent on the Catholic revival and various forms of classicism - whether neoplatonism or neostoicism - that it lost its meaning and purpose as soon as men started moving beyond these particular ideologies.

The rise of absolutism remains a phenomenon difficult to describe and difficult to understand. In a broad sense the state is supposed, in the course of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to have acquired more power than it possessed in the Middle Ages; that is, to have obtained and developed better instruments for ruling large numbers of people. The growth of the population, commercial expansion, improvements in banking, better means of communication - including the spread of literacy due to the new printing presses - increased the rulers' responsibilities, enabled them to get much closer to their subjects and generally made government more comprehensive. This was a relatively slow process and so hard to perceive that no one thought it necessary to examine what ought to be done with the additional power flowing to the state. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it seemed not unlikely that princes and representative bodies would share the new power. In England, France, the Netherlands and other states parliaments and monarchs increased their authority simultaneously without giving much thought to the implications and theoretical justification of this situation. But by degrees both prince and estates realised the awkwardness of their position. Endless bickering over fiscal matters and financial control debilitated government. Religious problems brought conflict to a head in France and the

[p. 130]

Netherlands. When the Protestant opposition to a Roman Catholic prince succeeded in associating itself with representative assemblies which were already more powerful than in the past, the scope of the problem was immensely widened: religion mattered incomparably more than taxation. It was then that people felt the need to justify their position in the conflict, and Europe was flooded by a torrent of writings on political theory. Never before had such a perplexing variety and quantity of political ideas been put forward; never before had a controversy generated such an inexhaustible thirst for theoretical justification. Europe had frequently been torn by religious disputes and war; what was new was the dramatic expansion of political philosophy.

Not that political thought moved into totally new areas. The theoretical political discussion brought to such a climax by the religious strife borrowed many of its concepts and terms from early fifteenth-century debates in the Roman Catholic church. During the long struggles between the papacy and the councils of Constance (1414-18) and Basle (1431-49), conciliar theories approximating to the doctrine of constitutional and popular sovereignty and papal philosophies close to the idea of legislative sovereignty had developed.¹ These were either copied or rediscovered for different purposes by secular thinkers in the sixteenth century, and in a political framework they became much more explosive than they had been in their original ecclesiastical context. Power in the state was something altogether different from power in the church. The danger inherent in the adaptation of theories evolved in heated ecclesiastical debate to a political situation was that they acquired a degree of reality and carried consequences unthought of by the clerical philosophers who had formulated them. After all, to say that the pope possesses absolute legislative sovereignty is a relatively innocuous proposition compared to the statement that the king of France has this attribute. In France millions of men were dependent on the form of their government; outside France millions of Europeans were dependent on the ambitions of a French king holding absolutist doctrines. Papal claims had a strong indirect effect since these made it impossible for the reformers to keep their protest within the prescribed boundaries. State sovereignty, however, was experienced more directly. Religious dissent was caused by the pope's sovereign refusal to accept the reforms proposed to him. The religious wars, with all their misery and brutality, were caused by the sovereign refusal of the secular princes to admit dissent in their states. The philosophical principle of absolutism helped to wreck the unity of the church. When applied to secular government, it wrecked countries and societies and wrought havoc in the life of millions.

1 Black, Monarchy and Community.

[p. 131]

Of course the point is not that absolute rulers were particularly stupid, excessively cruel or exclusively responsible for the tragic turn taken by European history. If there is a point to be made, it is that such an abstract and extreme conception of sovereignty caused the rulers to formulate their policies on the strength of an idealised interpretation of what dominium ought to be rather than on a realistic assessment of their particular circumstances. It is perhaps vain to speculate whether French and Spanish kings who had not been taught that their authority was by definition limitless would have refrained from trying to enforce their will so tenaciously, but the question ought to be put. The bitterness of the conflicts might not have been less, but it would not have been further exasperated by the largely unsuccessful attempts of monarchs and governments of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century generally to enforce policies based on principles that were becoming increasingly clear (thanks to the excellent and profound writers of the age), if impossible to put into operation because of the practical limits of power at the time. Because the theory could not readily be transformed into practice, wars lasted longer and their costs rose. Absolutism raised the rulers' objectives so high that the inevitable compromises which ultimately had to be agreed were extremely difficult to reach. It may sound reckless to say that in the absence of absolutist doctrine the settlement of 1598 in France could have been reached much earlier, or the truce in the Netherlands concluded long before 1609, but to this writer it seems not unlikely.

It is fair to suppose that for the masses of the population in any period of history the form of government under which they live matters only in so far as they experience its material consequences. Monarchy, however, usually aspires to be popular. Its defenders claim that it is rooted in the psychological need of most people to have some father-figure indicate the boundaries within which men are free to organise their lives, and argue that the monarch seeks to further the interests of the flock he is herding. Absolute monarchy raised itself above such trivialities. Medieval kingship kept intimate connections with heaven and earth. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when heaven had moved so infinitely far away, royalty also sought and perhaps found support in the masses: the paternal monarchy of the Middle Ages became the popular, constitutional and national monarchy of the post French Revolution period. During the ancien régime monarchy was different. It had no connections with the people, it was not national in the modern sense of the word and of course it was not constitutional. If it looked up to heaven it did so without humility. It sought strength from a very distant God who provided help in as haughty a manner as that by which kings ruled the earth. Monarchy wanted to be isolated. It wanted to stand on its own. It was supported by educated men who were conversant with the latest cultural innovations, who read and wrote a language which no one outside a tiny élite was

[p. 132]

able to understand and who despised the plebs on the basis of arguments taken from ancient writers and repeated in Latin ad nauseam. These thoughtless vociferations against the ferocious, cruel, servile, corruptible masses - accompanied by neostoic praise of aristocratic virtue, endurance and wisdom - are shocking in their banality and in their humanist arrogance, but they served their purpose admirably. In this culture a lack of proper classical education and hopeless backwardness are convincingly demonstrated by unwillingness to equate democracy with anything but wild anarchy and despotism.

If no historian has seriously attempted to interpret French absolutism as a system particularly kind to the masses - though the early Stuart kings are supposed to have shown paternal if ineffective concern for the poor - there has been much learned discussion about its roots in other social classes. This is not the place to summarise the discussion or to make statements about whether French absolutism was feudal or bourgeois. Neither is this unpretentious essay intended as a contribution to the debate started by the researches of the Russian historian B.F. Porchnev into the French soulèvements populaires of the first half of the seventeenth century.² This much, however, must be said: it should be obvious to any reader of the numerous studies generated by this debate that it is not only more cautious but decidedly wiser to refrain from sociological generalisations wide open to attack from many different sides. Of course kings, and particularly French kings, enlisted the services of non-nobles who became excellent ministers. Of course the ‘bourgeois’ in Paris and the provincial towns disliked being disturbed by riots and pillage and welcomed royal help to keep order. Of course Henri IV, Richelieu and Mazarin refused to leave the high nobility as much power and independence as it wanted and thus provoked bitter conflict. It is perfectly true that social disturbances were rampant in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Porchnev counted about a hundred soulèvements in French towns between 1623 and 1647 and interpreted these as parts of the perennial conflict between ‘the people’ and ‘the absolutist system of exploitation’. Incidentally, textbooks on the history of the Dutch Republic - decidedly a non-absolutist state - furnish examples of simular ‘risings’. Between 1610 and 1635 the ‘masses’ of Dutch towns rose in revolt at least twenty-five times and the Dutch population, it should be noted, was ten times smaller than that of France. Must we conclude that we find proof here of the perennial conflict between ‘the people’ and ‘the bourgeois system of exploitation’?

Where in any case does this discussion lead us? Not to any firm conclusion, it would seem. The pieces of the puzzle (which is infinitely more complicated than can here be indicated) do not help us to understand the

2 Porchnev, Soulèvements populaires. See infra, 139-148.

[p. 133]

refractory ancien régime reality. ‘The declining nobility’, ‘the rising bourgeoisie’, ‘the bourgeois character of the French Parlements’, ‘the rebellious masses’, and many other attempts to formulate a working hypothesis for further speculation, have been abandoned by most historians; but they have not been eliminated altogether and have proved remarkably tenacious of life. It would seem that it is necessary for our age to associate a form of government with a social reality and to explain or understand that form as the expression or the result of deeper forces working in society. The simplest way to do so is of course by linking government to class. It is interesting to see Roland Mousnier, whose knowledge of the period is unequalled and whose opinions are both firm and subtle, succumb to this intellectual obsession. In his famous polemic against Porchnev he at first held that the whole idea of a French early-seventeenth-century class struggle, between feudal and aristocratic exploiters under the king on the one hand and exploited masses on the other, was a chimera because the concept of class was inapplicable to a society differently articulated. Yet he leaves the impression that he is making out a case for the ‘progressiveness’ of French absolutism and emphasising the dynamic reality of ‘the bourgeoisie’ as a social class.³

A crucial element of absolutist theory was its radical distinction between government and subject, between state and society - a distinction which led a consistent philosopher like Hobbes to deny that society had an independent existence at all. Between government and individual nothing was left. This of course was not the ‘official’ theory of absolutism. For absolute power was considered to be of divine origin and Christian by its nature, which implied much more than a justification of limitless authority. It is no accident that Hobbes, whose idea of sovereignty was conceptually free from divine inspiration, made short work of the idea of community. ‘Official’ absolutism could not do this. God's purpose in investing absolute rulers with power was to establish a harmonious, hierarchical, political universe. In that universe Christian people were responsible individuals, having possessions, a place in society and an immortal soul. These must be recognised, as God wants Christians to have property and Christian society to be organised hierarchically. In this sense absolutism was ‘constitutional’ and conservative, the very opposite of un-Christian despotism. It is well known that for all his rash extremism Louis XIV refrained from abolishing elements in his state which were rooted, or supposed to be rooted, in constitutional tradition and did not seek to alter the old order radically. This was left for the enlightened despots of the eighteenth century to whom the droit divin theory mattered less and who thus felt less bound by the constitutional limits imposed by this doctrine.

3 Mousnier, ‘Soulèvements populaires’; idem, ‘Structures sociales’.

[p. 134]

But did this ‘constitutional’ character of absolutism draw the king nearer to the social organisation which he was committed to protect? This is not likely. For the paradox of absolutism was that even its ‘constitutional’ and conservative Christian nature tended to raise sovereignty to new heights not only in theory but in daily practice. Absolutism with its legislative sovereignty was by definition creative. If it was limited in the sense described, it had to seek other fields where it was allowed to operate more freely. For power, it was thought, tended to expand and extend itself and according to absolutists this was as it should be. This patently arbitrary statement is, strangely enough, still repeated in textbooks on political philosophy; though history, and daily life, show in endless variety another tendency of power, namely to wither away, disappear or abdicate. If sovereignty and power are to be dynamic concepts they must operate dynamically, and if they cannot do so on the level of organised institutions and hierarchic orders they have to rise above them. This they did in the seventeenth century when it was common practice to keep the existing institutions and social organisations virtually untouched but to superimpose new ideas, institutions and rules upon them and so to create a whole new layer of government, a higher platform of sovereignty. In this way absolutism was elevated above the unreformed constitution that was spared and respected. In areas of government where the constitutional tradition had not penetrated, the vital limitations of absolutism implied by its divine inspiration and Christian character were to some extent reconciled with its dynamic nature and its ambition to be limitless. The result of this was that the isolation of absolutist government increased; it moved into unknown heights of abstraction.

Not only in France, but in most monarchical states of Central Europe, the absolute princes proved unable and unwilling to use the medieval representative assemblies in their original sense as channels through which state power was drawn from and flowed towards the subjects. Kings discovered other ways of making their will felt.⁴ First they ruled in close collaboration with their councils. When these bodies tended to become self-willed institutions, ambitious of independent responsibilities, the absolute king preferred to ignore them and to consult only his inner council of ministers. Having previously created social institutions such as the estates and even social groups such as the noblesse de robe which filled conseils and collèges, monarchy withdrew into the isolation and loneliness of absolutism. Louis XIV refused to listen to organisations that claimed to be representative; he did not often consult his council; he was reluctant to have a cabinet and did his work mainly with the aid of individual ministers appointed and dismissed at will. This was absolutism in its most perfect form. It had cut its roots. It did not associate itself with any

4 Hartung en Mousnier, ‘La monarchie absolue’; Mousnier, ‘Absolutism’.

[p. 135]

particular class or group of the French population. It withdrew from society and from institutions which had been created by the French monarchy and had long served it, acting on premises about political power put forward by intellectuals since the sixteenth century. But to be alone and superior a king must also withdraw from the centre of the country and build, at Versailles, not just a new palace but the very symbol of absolutism. The end of absolutism was symbolised equally clearly a century later by the enforced return of the royal family to the national centre, to Paris. Even for those unable to believe in the logic of history, it may give pleasure to find that the most pompous decisions connected with Versailles - the absolute monarchy, the establishment of the German empire, the peace treaty of 1919 - were disastrous, ephemeral and too artificial to last.

It is rather doubtful if Central European princes achieved a similar measure of isolation as French kings. The Prussian monarchy, for example, probably leaned on the nobility to a greater extent than Louis XIV, although the Great Elector did so unwillingly. The English situation cannot easily be compared to that of France. Mousnier has emphasised the similarities of French and English royal absolutism in the early seventeenth century, and J.P. Cooper has denied them in essays⁵ so erudite and subtle that it is not easy to define his conclusions. Stephan Skalweit has clarified in a paper he prepared for the international historical congress at Moscow in 1970⁶ the points that must be taken into consideration in any comparison. These French, English and German endeavours are doubtless steps towards the synthetic explanation we need; but if comparative history has been rightly described as one of the most worthwhile historical pursuits, it is decidedly also the most difficult. Skalweit expects that new and important insights will clear up many of the uncertainties which still bedevil our thinking. But in order to carry through a satisfactory investigation into the effect of absolutism in various countries - for this seems now to be the direction into which we are moving - we must know what exactly we are trying to measure and lay down a yardstick by which we are to measure it. Until we agree on these matters, our discussion is bound to remain somewhat tentative. The problem itself becomes even more complicated, but also it would seem more interesting and more important from a general point of view, if we compare not only the European monarchies in their absolutist phase but also the republican forms of government of the period.

Can a republic be governed ‘absolutely’ and if so, is such republican absolutism more or less effective than a monarchical one? Recently

5 Cooper, ‘Differences between Governments’, idem, ‘Introduction’, idem, ‘Fall of the Stuart Monarchy’.

6 Skalweit, Verfassungskonflikt (ongepagineerd).

[p. 136]

Mousnier has stated that in England parliament exercised after 1640 ‘an arbitrary, absolute and truly sovereign power of which the kings had only dreamed, helped by ideas of using sovereignty and raison d'état in the name of the people’.⁷ Indeed, one of the crucial developments in European, and for that matter world history, was the adoption of sovereignty by potentially democratic bodies or - to put it crudely - the suddenly discovered possibility that absolutist democracy might be a satisfactory form of government. ‘Democracy’ was, however, not necessarily defined in exact terms. It was possible for the post-1640 English parliament to claim that rather than being the representative of the people it was ‘the people itself’ and possessed absolute autonomous legislative sovereignty. In his Observations upon some of His Majesties late Answers and Expresses of 1642 Henry Parker defended an absolutism more absolute than Bodin's, and in other writings he claimed for parliament the power to abolish Magna Carta or the Petition of Right. This was a theoretical position which had not been reached elsewhere. In the Netherlands discussion about sovereignty had not yet taken such a course. In his Politica methodice digesta of 1603 Johannes Althusius, whose system was inspired by the Revolt of the Netherlands, pointed out that all sovereignty was legislative and resided with the people. But what he meant was by no means what Parker meant forty years later. Althusius, as other publicists in the Netherlands of the sixteenth century, wanted to prove that a representative body, or a body considered representative, had the right to resist a despotic prince. Sovereignty was defined by him as popular in order to allow the so-called popular representatives to withdraw it from a ruler who exercised it in an illegal manner. Sovereignty was not used by Althusius as a creative and dynamic concept symbolising the soul of state power; sovereignty was not basically power to be exercised, it was power to resist illegitimate exercise of it. The concept was thus interpreted quite differently from the way in which Bodin or Parker used it - as an instrument to defend the constitutional tradition and not as an instrument to unify and strengthen the state.⁸

It was nevertheless in the Netherlands that democratic republican absolutism was for the first time investigated and defined in consistent theories.⁹ The idea that democracy is a despotic form of government was not new; on the contrary, it was one of the major objections long raised against democracy. In the 1660s and 1670s several Dutch theorists argued that the absolute character of democracy was its greatest asset. They believed with Hobbes that power was needed to restrain men, but found it unwise to give absolute authority to one individual. For if man is perhaps

7 Mousnier, ‘Absolutism’, 127.

8 See supra, 108-109.

9 Kossmann, Politieke theorie.

[p. 137]

not thoroughly bad he is at any rate capricious, unstable and unreliable. The more absolute a state, the more efficiently obedience and order can be organised. Monarchy, dependent as it is on one single person, is less absolute than aristocracy and aristocracy less absolute than democracy. Spinoza stated in his Tractatus Politicus (published in 1677) that ‘the greater the right of the sovereign the more does the form of the state agree with the dictate of reason’, and that ‘absolute sovereignty (imperium absolutum), if any such thing exists, is really the sovereignty held by the whole people.’¹⁰ However extravagant such a definition of absolutism must have seemed to most contemporaries, at least one of Spinoza's critics realised its crucial importance. Ulric Huber, who taught politics and law at the University of Franeker in Friesland, laid down in De jure civitatis (third edition, 1694) that although power is by definition absolute in all forms of government, it is exercised more absolutely in an aristocracy than in a monarchy. A king always tempers the monarchical character of his government because, in spite of his pretensions, he is obliged to consult the nobles of the realm: if his rule degenerates into tyranny it is the great who will be his first victims. In an aristocracy the exercise of sovereignty is more intense (intentior) and more absolute (absolutior) because between the mass of the subjects and the rulers there is no intermediate class of people who mitigate power or who serve as the natural object of the monarch's hatred. In other words, the mass of the people tends to suffer more from aristocratic than from monarchical absolutism. Huber agreed however with Spinoza in thinking that the most absolute state is the best and that an aristocracy is thus preferable to a monarchy. Direct democracy, although admittedly the most absolute state, he held to be dangerous as the masses are unruly and rebellious. However, if in a democracy the obviously inadequate and irresponsible individuals were excluded from power, or if in an aristocracy all competent people move so easily towards high office that the distinction between aristocracy and democracy becomes insignificant, the best possible state is at hand, both freer and far more absolute and stable than a monarchy. It will become even better if one more element is introduced: a written constitution in which man's security, property and liberty are guaranteed.

It was by this type of reasoning rather than by droit divin theories that absolutism was brought back to earth. Eventually absolutist republicanism turned out to be more fruitful than the rarified extremism of absolute monarchy. In the seventeenth century it was still wholly inadequate to serve as a realistic alternative for most states. But in spite of its obvious limitations it contained elements which rendered the idea of absolutism viable. Absolute monarchy proved a failure. Already in the early eighteenth century it was becoming clear that the ‘modern state’ was by no

10 Spinoza, Political Works, 370-371, 372-373.

[p. 138]

means necessarily an absolute monarchy, although it was still widely thought that to achieve stability a state must be absolute. The ‘absolute state’ came to stand for ‘the state’ in general. When it was associated first with Hobbesian individualism and then with Dutch republicanism, the concept became so flexible and realistic that it lost its singularity. It could now be used to explain some important requirements of political life - the permanence of power as well as its functional limitations - without being elevated to the realm of juridical abstraction. Thus it was saved for posterity.

In yet another way absolutism deeply influenced European developments. In one of his interesting essays Gerhard Oestreich¹¹ has shown that for the present generation of historians it is difficult to believe in the merits for which absolutism was so often praised. Even if we assume (and it is not certain that we ought to) that absolute monarchy strove for ‘centralisation’, we know that it did not succeed. Much more important, as a result of absolute government and the absolutist spirit of the age, is what Oestreich has called Sozialdisziplinierung: absolutism helped to transform man into a socially disciplined being who learned to obey and to be obeyed, to like law and order, to place the stoic virtues of self-control and reason above passion and lust. In his relations with superiors, equals and inferiors he was taught to keep to clearly defined rules. In the relations between the states, the Jus Europeanum Publicum and the slowly developing law of war were intended to clarify and put order into a chaotic situation. In military matters, in administration and in public or private morals discipline was thought to be of primary importance; it had to be furthered, if necessary, by harsh measures. This was, according to Oestreich, the lasting achievement of monarchical absolutism. He may well be right that this was a service absolutist monarchy rendered and one which benefited other forms of government: no democracy can function if its subjects have not learned to behave as socially responsible beings prepared to obey the rules. If Western democracy is at present (as is generally believed) going through a crisis that will transform it, we may be moving into a new post-absolutist era. Not only the exorbitant exaltation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century monarchical absolutism but also the more realistic practices of democratic absolutism and discipline may disappear, though both have undeniably played a most significant role.

11 Oestreich, ‘Strukturprobleme des Absolutismus’, 179-197.