Quotes About Absolutism

The process of political centralization can actually lead to a form of absolutism, as the king and his associates can crush other powerful groups in society. This is indeed one of the reasons why there will be opposition against state centralization

Absolutism reigned not just in much of Europe but also in Asia, and similarly prevented industrialization during the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution. The Ming and Qing dynasties of China and the absolutism of the Ottoman Empire illustrate this pattern.

Kingdom of Kongo when European traders arrived. The long-distance trade that transformed Europe also transformed the Kingdom of Kongo, but again, initial institutional differences mattered. Kongolese absolutism transmogrified from completely dominating society, with extractive economic institutions that merely captured all the agricultural output of its citizens, to enslaving people en masse and selling them to the Portuguese in exchange for guns and luxury goods for the Kongolese elite.

Absolutism and a lack of, or weak, political centralization are two different barriers to the spread of industry. But they are also connected; both are kept in place by fear of creative destruction and because the process of political centralization often creates a tendency toward absolutism.

It's all very well to put the government in the hands of the perfect man, but what do you do when the perfect man gets a belly-ache?' That's the major argument against any kind of absolutism.

On voit que choisir la mort a ici une tout autre signification que dans les vertus héroïques. Là-bas, la mort finit par devenir une valeur et un but, car elle incarne l'absolu mieux que la vie. Ici, elle est moyen et non fin ; elle est l'ultime recours de l'individu désirant affirmer sa dignité.

Up to the abdication of the last Tsar one of the principal articles in the Fundamental Laws stated, simply, 'His Majesty is an absolute monarch who is not obliged to answer for his actions to anyone in the world but has the power and the authority to govern his states and lands as a Christian sovereign, in accord with his desire and goodwill.

The true fanatic is a theocrat, someone who sees himself as acting on behalf of some super personal force the Race, the Party, History, the proletariat, the Poor, and so on. These absolve him from evil, hence he may safely do anything in their service.

If all meaning were relative, then the meanings of the terms in the proposition "All meaning is relative" would be relative. Therefore the proposition "All meaning is relative" destroys itself. It is nothing but an evasion of reality. That seems a high price to pay, even for the privilege of killing people.

I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.

Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning [socialism] is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.

ONE of the more important arguments in favour of Socialism is that contained in the slogan 'self-government in industry'. As in the political sphere the King's absolutism was broken by the peoples' right to share decisions and later by its sole right to decide, so the absolutism of owners of the means of production and of entrepreneurs is to be abolished by consumers and workers.

Originally, i.e., before Karl Marx, the term "right" meant the supporters of representative government and civil liberties, as opposed to the "left" who favored royal absolutism and the absence of civil rights.

Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.

There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.

The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.

Mit dem Ideal der absoluten Freiheit wird dasselbe Unwesen getrieben wie mit allem Absoluten.

As the founders often cautioned, a self-governing republic doesn't have a governing class. Part of America's current predicament is that it now has a permanent, unelected one, unanswerable to the people. Absolutism—soft perhaps, but absolutism nonetheless—has replaced a democratic republic.

The law of love is the ultimate law because it is the negation of law; it is absolute because it concerns everything concrete. The paradox of final revelation, overcoming the conflict between absolutism and relativism, is love.

Metternich objected to all such constitutions not merely because they were representative, and hence incompatible with absolutism, but also because they were national, and thus incompatible with the structure of the Austrian Empire. A national constitution, Metternich believed, would be the death of Austria.