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The other major theorist of absolutism was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). He wrote immediately after the civil wars in England in the 1640s, conflicts that partially stemmed from religious fanaticism. Hobbes took the title of his most famous work Leviathan from biblical references to a piercing and crooked sea monster of that name who devoured anything in his path and could not be controlled by men. Leviathin represented a state so powerful that the monarch could not be restrained by any human authority.
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Absolutism seemed, to political philosophers like Hobbes and Bodin, the only workable solution to the religious divisions that exposed people to such anarchy as to render everyday human life impossible. Absolutism provided a strategy for survival in a frightening political world, just as predestination served as a rock of certainty in an uncertain spiritual world.
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We have already had one example of absolutism: the only time in which the English lived under a government which the absolutists craved was after the beheading of Charles I and under the dictatorship of Cromwell.
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Enlightened absolutism:.
Jean-Jacque Rousseau's Social Contract 1762. Swiss-born writer, democrat. Book received little attention during his lifetime, but ultimately became his most famous work. Vision of participatory democracy in which the community became a force for the moral development of all its citizens. The people are sovereign and that government officials must serve as their delegates, but at same time, in order to take part in society, the people must subjugate their individual wills to the general will. What was truly best for the community: it took precedence over the selfish, short-sighted desires of particular individuals. MAN IS BORN FREE and everywhere he is in chains.
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Prussia's Frederick II the great like to call himself "the first servant of the state." The great philosophe Voltaire spent several years at Frederick's court in Potsdam.
