The Origins of Autocracy

In practice, the attempts to implement this right ran up against the resistance of the system, often ending tragically for the absolute mon- archs. In theory, it was precisely on economic limitations to power that the distinction between monarchy and its potential "deviations" was based. Jean Bodin—a contemporary of Ivan the Terrible's and the author of a classic apologia for absolutism which exercised co­lossal influence on the entire ideological tradition of this structure— appeared in his The Commonwealth to be no less radical, at first glance, than Ivan the Terrible in his letters to Kurbskii. He, too, assumed that "on earth there is nothing higher after God than sovereign princes, established by Him as His lieutenants for the governing of people," and that he who "withholds his respect from a sovereign prince, also withholds respect from God, whose image on earth the prince is.'"⁸ Furthermore, Bodin, as distinct from the Aristotelian tradition, con­sidered the essential mark of the citizen to be, not participation in courts and councils, but just the reverse—unconditional submission to the unlimited power of the monarch. But, for all this, Bodin re­garded the property of citizens as their inalienable possession, in the disposition of which they were no less sovereign than was the mon­arch in ruling his people. To tax citizens of a part of their inalienable property without their voluntary consent was, from Bodin's point of view, ordinary robbery.

Ivan the Terrible, with his sharply polemical temperament, would undoubtedly have seen a logical contradiction in Bodin's conception. And he would have been right. But the essence of the phenomenon of absolutism was contained in this logical contradiction. Absolutism ac­tually was a paradox, albeit a living paradox which lasted for centuries.

Bodin's "contradiction" points up a significant deformation in the integrity of the supposedly unlimited political body, with its constant assertions of divine sovereignty. King Francois I of France, a contem­porary of Ivan Ill's, in desperate need of money, did not, for exam­ple, plunder Marseilles, as any despot would have done in his place (and as Ivan the Terrible did in an analogous situation by pillaging Novgorod), but instead put judicial offices up for sale, thereby in­voluntarily creating a new privileged stratum—that of hereditary judges—and a new institution, the parliaments. The very fact that these offices were bought, and, consequently, that the government was trusted, and that even in the deepest tyrannical twilight of France these privileges were never violated, is of primary historical importance—a kind of institutional materialization of the apparently ephemeral po­litical paradox of absolutism. Here is how Professor N. Kareev de­scribes this phenomenon: "The unlimited monarchy was compelled to tolerate around itself autonomous corporations of hereditary judges: each of them and all of them together could perhaps be sent wherever the king liked, but they could not be expelled from their posts, because this would have meant ... to violate the right of property."™ Bodin, in formulating his contradiction, was simply summarizing the actual practice of his time. And this practice showed that absolutism was com­pelled to tolerate economic limitations on power.

The presence of these economic limitations, making possible au­tonomous economic activity on the part of producers, excluded per­manent stagnation, and made absolutism capable of fundamental economic modernization and expanded reproduction of the gross national product. The capacity for economic progress characteristic of absolutist structures was combined with their capacity for political dynamism, and for what could be called expanded political reproduction. Their gradual transformation into democratic structures leaves no doubt of this.

In place of the reduction and polarization of social forces charac­teristic of despotism, absolutism was marked by a multiplicity of social strata. Variety and inequality were its hallmarks. Not immobility and uniformity, but, on the contrary, social and economic differentiation of the peasantry, its constant migration into the cities, and, conse­quently, urbanization and the formation of a strong middle class, were the leading processes in absolutist societies.