ABSOLUTISM. — This term, in the historical sense, is ordinarily used to designate the monarchical period extending from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In the struggle against feudalism, the sovereign tends to unify powers and, identifying himself with the State, according to the phrase attributed to Luigi XIV, «L'Etat c'est moi», a characteristic expression of royal absolutism, rises as the supreme authority and sole organ of power, upon whose will, unrestricted by law, all civil life depends. To support royal claims, court jurists began to elaborate the dogma of sovereignty «legibus soluta», which was later to undergo extensive development. Among the best known was Bodin, who published the De republica in 1578.
Nevertheless, this historical delimitation is conventional. In practice, absolutism goes back to the Eastern State with its deified monarch, and to the Roman State with its imperial cult; theoretically, moreover, in the Digest the emperor’s authority is defined as legibus soluta and his will as the supreme norm: «quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem». Overwhelmed by Christian thought, this conception disappeared in the Middle Ages, which affirmed the supremacy of law, although it survived in part among commentators on Roman law, who, like Bartolo, moderated its meaning by subjecting the prince to the laws of God and to the ius naturale.
A revival occurred with Machiavelli, who in the Principe subordinated everything to the interests of the State. The absolutist conception broke into juridical doctrine from the eighteenth century onward, as a result of naturalistic rationalism, which detached law from its transcendent ontological foundation. In the theories of Hobbes and Rousseau, the State or the nation possesses unlimited power. The development of modern juridical thought is dominated by the dogma of absolute sovereignty; from the nineteenth century onward, positivism contributed to its formation by conceiving the State as a self-subsisting entity with its own life and ends, absorbing the individual into itself as a cell or part, as did immanentism, which with Hegel deified it as the manifestation of the divine in the world. Yet there is a difference between the absolutism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and modern absolutism: the absolute monarch acknowledged a divinity, subject to whose will and law he felt himself bound; the absolute State, on the other hand, is agnostic and recognizes no limit, whether of an objective or transcendent order, since its will is the autonomous source of all law.
According to Catholic doctrine, the State is relative and limited. As an effect of the natural laws of solidarity, it depends first of all on God, author of nature and supreme legislator, and secondly on man, who creates it through a conscious act and maintains it in being through cooperation toward the same collective end, the common good, making use of social life in order to be integrated and attain his supernatural ends. For this very reason, its power is limited by the law of God, by natural and international law, extending as far as its essential purpose extends, which consists in integrating man with that sum of goods that makes possible his material, intellectual, and moral perfection. Beyond this limit there exist objective values, such as the rights of the person, which the State is called upon to respect. Moreover, alongside civil society there exists a more perfect society, the Church, to which exclusively, according to Christ’s teaching, «Date a Cesare quello che è di Cesare e a Dio quello che è di Dio» (Mt. 22, 21), belongs authority in the supernatural order.