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absolutism |
Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Legal, Wikipedia, Hutchinson | 0.01 sec. |
absolutismPolitical doctrine and practice of unlimited, centralized authority and absolute sovereignty, especially as vested in a monarch. Its essence is that the ruling power is not subject to regular challenge or check by any judicial, legislative, religious, economic, or electoral agency. Though it has been used throughout history, the form that developed in early modern Europe (16th–18th century) became the prototype; Louis XIV is seen as the epitome of European absolutism. Religious authority was assumed by the monarch, who became the head of the church as well as the state, on the basis that the right to rule came from God (see divine kingship). See also authoritarianism, dictatorship, totalitarianism. absolutism 1. Philosophy a. any theory which holds that truth or moral or aesthetic value is absolute and universal and not relative to individual or social differences b. the doctrine that reality is unitary and unchanging and that change and diversity are mere illusion 2. Christianity an uncompromising form of the doctrine of predestination How to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, add the site to iGoogle, or visit webmaster's page for free fun content. |
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| A more complete imagination than Philip's might have pictured a youth of splendid hope, for he must have been entering upon manhood in 1848 when kings, remembering their brother of France, went about with an uneasy crick in their necks; and perhaps that passion for liberty which passed through Europe, sweeping before it what of absolutism and tyranny had reared its head during the reaction from the revolution of 1789, filled no breast with a hotter fire. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. |
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