Absolutism

ABSOLUTISM. - With this term, in a historical sense, one usually designates the monarchical period that extends from the 16th century to the 18th century. In the struggle against feudalism the sovereign tends to unify the powers and, identifying himself with the State, according to the phrase attributed to Louis XIV "L'Etat c'est moi", a characteristic expression of royal a., he rises as the supreme authority and sole organ of power, on whose will, not limited by law, all civil life depends. To support the royal claims, court jurists began to elaborate the dogma of sovereignty "legibus soluta", which was later to have ample developments. Among the best known is Bodin, who in 1578 published the De republica.

Nevertheless this historical delimitation is conventional. In practice a. goes back to the Oriental State with its divinized monarch, and to the Roman State with the imperial cult; theoretically, moreover, in the Digest the emperor's power is defined as legibus soluta and his will as the supreme norm: "quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem". Overthrown 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, who, like Bartolus, tempered its tenor by subjecting the prince to the laws of God and to the ius naturale.

There was a revival with Machiavelli, who in the Prince subordinated everything to the interest of the State. The absolutist conception burst into legal doctrine from the 18th century onward, because of the naturalistic rationalism that uprooted law from its transcendent ontological foundation. In the theories of Hobbes and Rousseau, the State or the nation has an unlimited power. The evolution of modern legal thought is dominated by the dogma of absolute sovereignty, to whose formation there contributed from the 19th century onward positivism, which conceived the State as an entity standing by itself with its own life and ends, absorbing the individual into it as a cell or part, and immanentism which, with Hegel, divinized it as an appearance of the divine in the world. However, between the a. of the 16th and 17th centuries and the modern one there exists a difference: the absolute monarch acknowledged a divinity, to whose will and law he felt himself subject; the absolute State is instead agnostic and admits no limit either of an objective order or of a 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 by a conscious act and keeps it in being through cooperation toward the same collective end, the common good, making use of social life in order to be integrated and to reach his otherworldly 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 end extends, which consists in the integration of man with that sum of goods which make possible for him 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 exclusively, according to the teaching of Christ, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Mt. 22, 21), belongs the power in the supernatural order.

Antonio Messineo