I

Absolutism is a troublesome word. Arthur O. Lovejoy warned that isms are ‘trouble-breeding and usually thought-obscuring terms, which one sometimes wishes to see expunged from the vocabulary of the philosopher and the historian altogether’. If this remark sounds harsh and reductive, Lovejoy's other consideration whereby isms ‘are names of complexes, not of simples’ could not be more appropriate to frame what has been attempted with this volume. ‘Absolutism’ is both a problematic historiographical category and a complex ‘compound’ of different elements: like a great many ism-terms it is a later coinage. But exploring the ways in which isms can be applied as well as the ways in which they fit with past terminology can be illuminating for the historian's work in understanding different sets of political ideas.

Our approach moves away from the three major views of absolutism: the ‘conservative’ for which it has always existed; the ‘Marxist’ for which it was an epoch between feudalism and capitalism and one contaminated by and linked to both; the ‘revisionist’ for which there was no absolutism and, therefore, we should not speak of it. Whereas these interpretations rest upon large-scale generalizations about historical process, ours is more modest but more concrete, namely the analysis of political thought in diverse historical contexts.