ABSOLUTISM IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE AND ITS ROLE IN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF CENTRALIZED NATION-STATES

Vititnev Sergey Fedorovich, Bruz Vladimir Vilenovich, Zenov Pavel Evgenievich

The centralization of state power in Europe during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and the transition from seigneurial fragmentation to the sovereign territorial monarchy remain the subject of a persistent historiographical debate. The disagreement concerns whether absolutism constituted a necessary stage in the formation of the centralized nation-state or merely one of several trajectories, alongside the parliamentary path of England and the composite monarchies of the Iberian and Central European regions. The aim of the study is to determine the functional place of the absolutist form of rule within the process of state centralization in the early modern period and its relation to the formation of the nation-state. Comparative-historical, historical-typological and historical-genetic methods are applied; the empirical basis comprises the political and legal doctrines of sovereignty, the institutional practice of the French, English, Spanish and Brandenburg-Prussian monarchies, and the pivotal acts of the era – the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, the Edict of Nantes of 1598 and its revocation in 1685. A comparison of the trajectories shows that absolutism shaped the fiscal-military and administrative apparatus that outlived the absolute monarchy itself and became the load-bearing structure of the subsequent nation-state; the political nation as a community takes shape later than the apparatus and is superimposed upon it. The stable yet incomplete correlation between absolutism and centralization indicates that the absolute monarchy functioned as the dominant, though not the only, form of the early modern centralizing state on the continent. It did not amount to a universal stage of its development.

Keywords:absolutism, early modern period, centralized state, nation-state, sovereignty, fiscal-military state, estates