Absolute monarchism

Absolute monarchism holds that sovereignty is indivisible and vested in a single ruler who is answerable to God and natural law but to no earthly institution — no assembly, court, church, or contract with subjects may limit or depose him.

Its structural argument comes from Bodin, who held that a commonwealth requires one final, unaccountable authority or it dissolves into faction and civil war; its theological and patriarchal foundations come from Bossuet and from Filmer's Patriarcha, which derived royal power from God's appointment and from the natural authority of fathers over families, making the king the father of the nation. This is the doctrine of divine right.

Its embodiment was the Europe of Louis XIV — 'l'état, c'est moi' — with its centralized bureaucracy, standing army, court at Versailles, and subordinated nobility, a model imitated from Spain to Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Because it concerns the source and location of sovereignty rather than the modern question of how much government should do, it is largely indifferent to economic arrangement, which is why it plots awkwardly on axes built for industrial-era disputes.

It was the principal target of early liberalism, and its decline is inseparable from the constitutionalist arguments — Locke's above all — developed explicitly to refute it; the English, American, and French revolutions were, among other things, practical refutations.

It survives today only in a handful of states and, more diffusely, in theoretical revivals that prize decisive, unified authority over the frictions of liberal pluralism — a reminder that its core claim, that divided sovereignty invites chaos, has never entirely lost its appeal.