The Crisis of Classic Absolutism
As we know, absolute monarchy took hold in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because it was a more effective system of government than feudal monarchy and, above all, because the unchallenged authority of the king was the best bulwark against chaos.
10.1.1 A Century of Transformation
The major economic changes (Industrial Revolution), which began to transform Europe in the eighteenth century, however, gave rise to the emergence of a new cultural framework which necessarily affected the European kingdoms’ political adaptations to the new times. The seventeenth century in Europe was an era of pivotal scientific breakthroughs thanks to thinkers such as Leibniz, Newton and Descartes. It is no wonder, then, that the latter’s best-known work received the title Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637),[444] one vividly reflecting the seventeenth and eighteenth century’s euphoric embrace of rationalism and the era’s growing conviction that men could improve their lives and achieve full happiness through scientific development. This was the proposition defended by the philosophes (friends of wisdom), and the men who embraced the Encyclopedia, the proponents of the movement known as the Enlightenment (Lumieres in French, Aufklarung in German, Ilustracion in Spanish and Illuminismo in Italian).[445]
10.1.2 The “Philosophes” and the Kings
It is only to be expected, therefore, that philosophers such as Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Montesquieu and Rousseau were highly critical of the established order, particularly the Church and, of course, absolute monarchy. The philosophes did not, in fact, object to the absoluteness of the monarch’s authority as much as they did to the way in which he wielded it. In line with their Enlightenment ideas, they believed that the king’s function was not only to maintain order but to bring progress to his people.
The king, then, was no longer envisioned as an agent merely expected to defend an established order, in accordance with the old medieval idea of the “justice-dispensing king”. Rather, the era’s leading lights viewed monarchs as “reformist” agents who ought to free their kingdoms and peoples from obscurantism. In this sense it is significant that Voltaire was a strong advocate of “enlightened despotism” through which the souverains civilisateurs (Gorbatov 2006, 62) dedicated their governments’ actions to achieving the greatest level of well-being for their subjects.[446]The philosophes proved able to convince and win over the ruling monarchs to their way of thought. In the Habsburg monarchy, after 1748, for instance, Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, believed very firmly that expanded state power should be used to address all society’s ills. At the same time, this idea was ratified by most Austrian legal thinkers, who concluded that the dangers posed by feudal, decentralized justice were far more pernicious than those which could be expected from absolute monarchs, essentially because an enlightened despot, far from an arbitrary tyrant, exercised his power in the interest of the state, a sufficient guarantee that it would be exercised also in the interest of all his subjects (Bernard 1979, 3).
10.1.3 Absolutism vs. Despotism
Today the term “despot” is decidedly pejorative, but in the middle of the eighteenth century it was not saddled with this negative connotation.[447] It is extremely telling that one as cultured and intelligent as Diderot imagined the ideal ruler, the “philosopher king”,[448] to be “a despot”, and he best suited to govern wisely (Strugnell 1973,93-98).[449] In this sense, the case was quite similar to that of the term “tyrant”, which is today one of the worst epithets one can use to label a political leader, while in classical Greece it was simply a form of government which, in many cases, preceded and made possible the consolidation of democracy, as was the case, for example, in Athens under Peisistratus. After the French Revolution, however, the term “despot” came to acquire its negative connotation (Anderson 2000). Thus, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians began to speak of “enlightened absolutism” as a more appropriate description of eighteenth-century political practice than “enlightened despotism” (Beales 2005, 55), a term they found misleading and pejorative (Szabo 1994, 5).
10.2