ABSOLUTISM. — Historically, this term is used to designate the monarchical period that extended from the 16th to the 18th century. In the struggle against feudalism, the sovereign sought to unify powers and, identifying himself with the State—according to the phrase attributed to Louis XIV, “L'État c'est moi,” a characteristic expression of royal absolutism—stood as the supreme authority and the sole organ of power, upon whose unrestricted will, not limited by law, the entire civil life depended. To support royal pretensions, the jurists of the time began to elaborate the dogma of sovereignty “legibus soluta,” which was later to undergo extensive development. Among the most notable is Bodin, who in 1578 published *De republica*.
Nevertheless, this historical delimitation is conventional. In practice, absolutism dates back to the oriental State with its deified monarch, and to the Roman State with its imperial cult; theoretically, moreover, in the *Digest* the power of the emperor 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, surviving in part among the commentators of Roman law, such as Bartolus, who tempered its tenor by subjecting the prince to the laws of God and to natural law.
A revival occurred with Machiavelli, who in *The Prince* subordinated everything to the interest of the State. The absolutist conception burst into juridical doctrine from the 18th century onward, owing to naturalistic rationalism, which severed law from its transcendent ontological foundation. In the theories of Hobbes and Rousseau, the State or the nation wields unlimited power. The evolution of modern juridical thought is dominated by the dogma of absolute sovereignty, to whose formation, from the 19th century onward, positivism contributed by conceiving the State as an entity standing on its own, with its own life and ends, absorbing the individual as a cell or part, and immanentism, which, with Hegel, divinized it as the appearance of the divine in the world. Yet between the absolutism of the 16th and 17th centuries and modern absolutism there is a difference: the absolute monarch acknowledged a divinity to whose will and law he felt subject; the absolute State, by contrast, is agnostic and admits no limits, whether objective or transcendent, its will being 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, the 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, using social life to be integrated and to attain its supernatural ends. For this very reason, its power is limited by the law of God, by natural and international law, extending only as far as its essential end, which consists in the integration of man with that sum of goods that render 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 to respect. Moreover, alongside civil society there exists a more perfect society, the Church, to which, in an exclusive manner, according to the teaching of Christ, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's” (Mt. 22:21), belongs power in the supernatural order.