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Sovereignty Sovereignty
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Reformation Reformation
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Roman Law Roman Law
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Divine Right Divine Right
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Obedience Obedience
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Origins Origins
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Constitutions Constitutions
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References References
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17 Absolutism
Get accessMark Goldie is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge and is Fellow of Churchill College. He graduated from the University of Sussex and took his PhD at Cambridge. He has been co-editor of The Historical Journal and Vice-Master of Churchill College. He has published extensively in the field of the political, intellectual, and religious history of Britain, 1650‒1800, and is currently working on an intellectual biography of John Locke.
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Published:02 September 2011
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Abstract
Absolutism is a nineteenth-century term designed precisely to address the mismatch between doctrine and power. The intellectual resources of absolutism were far older than the Renaissance and Reformation. The absolutism of monarchs was a contingent and temporary corollary of the principal juridical development of the early modern period: the emergence of the concept of sovereignty. Absolute monarchy was a free rider on a concept that would later unseat it. Theorists of absolute sovereignty drew heavily on Roman law, and often invoked the idea of the translatio imperii, the inheritance by modern monarchies of Roman imperial authority. The sovereignty of kings, seeking to trump the divine imperium of the papacy, masqueraded its jurisprudence as the divinity of kings. The “divine right of kings” was a theological meditation on a juridical concept, not a species of mysticism, and rarely did absolutists endow monarchs with magical or sacerdotal attributes. Absolutism conspicuously appropriated religious form when expressed as a theory of obedience. Absolutist theory offered an account of the origins of civil authority.
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