Was the development of absolutism a response to the rising capitalist class and/or republicanism? My knowledge of late medieval history is really not as strong as it could be so I’m interested to hear what people think
Was the development of absolutism a response to the rising capitalist class and/or republicanism? My knowledge of late medieval history is really not as strong as it could be so I’m interested to hear what people think
I like this question a lot. I think I’d agree to an extent that absolutism was a response to the rising capitalist class yeah. In essence they gave in to the burghers economic demands, (pushing towarda capitalist economic relations in England in the 1200s and 1300s, in France in the 1500s and 1600s) but refused to hand over the highest reigns of power. Absolutism is the result of their maintaining the formal political structure of feudalism over top the structures of capitalism, growing more absolutist the greater the burghers power grows.
My view is that what most people typically think of when they hear “feudalism” and “medieval society” is this proto-absolutist states 1300s-1500s western Europe. So their conception of feudalism is is already feudalism in decay, its economic, social and even political structures rapidly being hollowed out by the emerging bourgeois in the cities.