244 Ch. 7 • The Age of Absolutism, 1650-1720

The illustration for the cover of the Englishman Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651)

depicts the absolute state. Note how the ruler’s body is made up of the masses over

whom he rules. England and then Great Britain, however, remained an exception

to the absolutist wave that swept across continental Europe.

protection. A ruler’s will thus became for Hobbes the almost sacred embodi­

ment of the state. In France, Jacques Bossuet (1627-1704), bishop and

tutor to Louis XIV, postulated that kings ruled by “divine right,” that is, by

virtue of the will of God. Unlike Hobbes’s notion of authority based on a

social contract, Bossuet held that the ruler’s authority stemmed from God

alone.

Yet theorists of absolutism recognized the difference between absolute

and arbitrary or despotic rule. Inherent in their theories was the idea that

the absolute ruler was responsible for looking after the needs of his people.

Bossuet summed up: “It is one thing for a government to be absolute, and

quite another for it to be arbitrary. It is absolute in that it is not liable to con­

straint, there being no other power capable of coercing the sovereign, who is

in this sense independent of all human authority.” But he went on, “it does

not follow from this that the government is arbitrary, for besides the fact that

all is subject to the judgment of God... there are also laws, in states, so

that whatever is done contrary to them is null in a legal sense; moreover,

there is always an opportunity for redress, either at other times or in other

conditions.” Thus, even according to one of the most determined propo­