Enlightened Despotism

ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM

ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM. One must first clarify the origins of the term: today "enlightened absolutism" is more commonly used. But in its original form, the term as coined by eighteenth-century French thinkers—philosophers, philosophical popularizers, and social commentators, known collectively as philosophes—described the kind of government they felt was necessary to break through the complex of laws, attitudes, and habits that maintained a society of unjust privilege, stunted economic growth, and perpetuated governmental inefficiency and waste. What they (and their fellows in other countries) desired was a despotisme éclairé. But this had little to do with real despotism, which in the minds of western Europeans was associated with oriental regimes such as that of the Turks, on whose rulers there were, it was supposed, no checks of any kind. What they had in mind was simply monarchies possessing sufficient power to establish enlightened policies that would lead to a fairer, better, and more humane society.

THE "ENLIGHTENED DESPOTS" AND THEIR POLICIES

Apart from several rulers of small territories, especially in Germany, there were certain monarchs (or powerful ministers of state) of large states in the second half of the eighteenth century who appeared to fit the picture of strong rulers prepared to accomplish such a program. Frederick II of Prussia (ruled 1740–1786), Joseph II (ruled 1765–1790) and Leopold II (ruled 1790–1792) of Austria, Catherine II (ruled 1762–1796) of Russia, Charles III (ruled 1759–1788) of Spain, and ministers such as the Marquis de Pombal in Portugal and Johann Frederick Struensee were frequently mentioned by the philosophes as models of enlightened governance. Their policies promoted religious tolerance, advocated full civil rights for religious minorities (including Jews), insisted on curbing wasteful governmental expenditures, sought in various ways to stimulate their economies, and attempted to liberate serfs from the feudal control of their noble lords. All of these reforms were seen by the philosophes as part of a long-planned program designed to lessen the power of traditionally entrenched groups such as the clergy, noble landlords, and corrupt officials in the name of greater equality and freedom. Similarly, their attempts to tax these groups directly (often for the first time), in combination with other measures such as new forms of taxation and the lessening of mercantilistic restrictions on economic life, were lauded as freeing their economies from the dead hand of the feudal past.

THE TIMING AND NATURE OF THE REFORMS

There is widespread agreement among historians today on the reasons for the timing of these reforms. The eighteenth century witnessed a number of wars that, in contrast to those of the previous century, were financed entirely by governments rather than largely by warlord-entrepreneurs who had extracted much of their costs from civilian populations through forced contributions and looting. The more controlled "polite" wars of the eighteenth century were a clear reaction against the barbaric and religious wars of the seventeenth century—but these were still long and very expensive wars. All states, but especially the larger ones, had to find new revenues to finance warfare and to cut expenditures in other areas by making their governmental operations more efficient. This was particularly true after the end of the longest and costliest war of the pre-Revolutionary period, the Seven Years' War (1756–1763). It was in the thirty years or so following that war that enlightened despotism really flourished.

Taxing previously exempt groups such as the nobility and clergy was one means of enhancing revenues, but so was regularizing the practices of government to achieve greater control, through bureaucratic and other reforms, over all of the subjects of a state. If it was true, as Leopold II of Austria put it, that monarchs were "drowning in the inkpot," it was because the sheer volume of state business had now outstripped the ability of monarchs to handle it with the old-fashioned, personal bureaucratic structures they had inherited from the past. Monarchs moved to establish both new institutions and a set of guidelines for bureaucrats that were both clear and uniform—a group of codified policies and procedures designed to ensure that the goals established by the monarch were pursued as intended. What these amounted to were primitive constitutions that helped to pave the way for the constitutional monarchies of the nineteenth century. In the end, paradoxically, these policies helped to make the monarchs themselves less necessary to the functioning of the state apparatus by establishing public law as a standard for governance. To the extent that their reforms were successful, they may well have helped to prevent revolutionary disturbances such as those that came to France in 1789 and after.

TWO INTERPRETATIONS OF REFORM

It has been pointed out that nearly all of the reforms of this period fit the pattern of earlier reforms designed not to reform society but to strengthen the position of the monarch himself within the state apparatus. There is some merit in this view. The reignsof Joseph II'smother MariaTheresa inAustria (ruled 1740–1780) and of Frederick II's father in Prussia (Frederick William I; ruled 1713–1740) can be adduced as examples. And it is clear that any weakening of the powers of either the nobility or the clergy would create a kind of power vacuum into which the monarch himself could step, assuming powers previously held by both groups as competitors for the exercise of public power within the state. Inthis context, furthermore, the freeing of serfs, who now became direct subjects of the crown, could be seen not only as a weakening of the powers of their previous lords, but also, simultaneously, as the assumption of vast new powers over them by the state as personified in the monarch. Finally, from this perspective, any benefit to the economy from reform would presumably result in greater revenues for the state, as would any improvement in the operations of government through curbs on official corruption and the elimination of wasteful expenditures. Similarly, the promotion of religious tolerance would remove a potent cause of social unrest, which was both disruptive to the economy and socially divisive in societies that needed greater unity in this period of intensifying international competition.

Thus (this argument runs) the reforms associated with the enlightened despots really had little or nothing to do with the humanitarian sentiments of genuine enlightenment (in spite of the Enlightenment rhetoric employed by most of them) and everything to do with strengthening the state and the monarch's position within it. That these rulers desired no fundamental restructuring of society is shown by the fact that in no cases were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy entirely eliminated.

This interpretation, however, while accurate as far as it goes, misses some important points about enlightened absolutism. First, it ignores the personal culture of most of these rulers—a culture that was to a considerable extent shaped by Enlightenment norms. Most of them grew up in the full flowering of the Enlightenment: they had much contact with leading figures of the movement, and professed to share its values. To ignore this fact is to deny all possibility that their motivations may have involved genuine humanitarian sentiment, and to suggest that their basic motive was also, in a sense, their basest motive. Second, it ignores the opinions of the philosophes themselves, most of whom believed that the motives of the enlightened despots were shaped, to a considerable extent, by enlightened values. They reasoned that if the reforms the latter sponsored did not go as far as some of the former hoped they might, the rulers were also practical people who understood the difference between philosophical dreams and political realities—and were quite comfortable with incremental reform. As an example, almost none among them believed that it was either possible or desirable to eliminate entirely the "society of orders," that is, a society in which the law was written differently for different groups, depending on their social rank. Finally, and perhaps most important, it ignores the fact that the reforms could serve both purposes simultaneously, making it unnecessary for contemporaries to draw this distinction. And in fact, they did not: most philosophes wanted monarchy strengthened just as much as did the rulers themselves (if indeed for somewhat different reasons) and saw the monarchs' work as beneficial to society.

THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM

In the end, enlightened despotism can be seen as the final stage of absolute monarchy, in which personal monarchical power indeed became stronger, but which also gave rise to a new conception of governmental power as rule by and under public law. This involved abandoning the theory of rule by "divine right," by which monarchs held their office by the grace of God, and justifying power by a new utilitarian standard: the welfare of the community they served. When Frederick II referred to himself as merely "the first servant of the state," he foreshadowed a wholly new concept of government—one that justified vast new powers for governments in the name and service of public welfare. Not all of the so-called enlightened despots achieved such results; of the major ones, Catherine II of Russia, who governed the most backward of states, achieved the least. France, interestingly, had no such ruler—until Napoleon.

See also Absolutism ; Catherine II (Russia) ; Charles III (Spain) ; Divine Right Kingship ; Enlightenment ; Frederick II (Prussia) ; Joseph II (Holy Roman Empire) ; Serfdom in East Central Europe .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bruun, Geoffrey. The Enlightened Despots. New York, 1929. An old but still useful survey of the reforms of the "enlightened despots." An entirely narrative approach.

Gagliardo, John G. Enlightened Despotism. New York, 1967. A strongly interpretive approach to the problem, with attention to the significance of reforms and to the importance of enlightened absolutism as an epoch of European history.

Ingrao, Charles. The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas, Institutions, and Reform under Frederick II, 1760–1785. Cambridge, U.K., 1987.

——. "The Problem of 'Enlightened Absolutism' and the German States." Journal of Modern History 58 (Dec. 1986): suppl., 161–180.

Liebel, Helen. Enlightened Bureaucracy versus Enlightened Despotism in Baden, 1750–1792. Philadelphia, 1965. Concentrates on the importance of the contribution of bureaucrats to the reforms of the period in one of the German states.

Scott, Hamish, ed. Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe. London, 1990. A series of essays on absolutism in different countries by a number of specialists.

John G. Gagliardo