English and European Political Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century: Revisionism and the Case of Absolutism

• Published in: The Journal of British studies 1996-04, Vol.35 (2), p.168-194
• Main Author: Sommerville, Johann P.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 17th century; 19th century; Absolutism; Authoritarianism; Civil law; Civil wars; Common law; Distinctiveness; Divine right; England; Forests; Freedoms; God; Historians; History of political ideas; Injunctions; Kings; Monarchs; Monarchy; Noncitizens; Parliaments; Political development; Political theory; Popes; Revisionism; Rule of law; Sovereignty; Theorists; United Kingdom; Unpleasant
• ISSN: 0021-9371; 1545-6986
• DOI: 10.1086/386103

The central argument of this article is that English political thinking in the early seventeenth century was not distinctively English. More particularly, we shall see that a number of English writers put forward political doctrines that were precisely the same as those of Continental theorists who are usually described as absolutists. If the Continental thinkers were absolutists, then so were the English writers. The theory of absolutism vested sovereign power in the ruler alone and forbade disobedience to the sovereign's commands unless they contradicted the injunctions of God Himself. It is with the theory of absolutism and not with its practice that this article is concerned. To claim that English and Continental ideas closely resembled each other, and that absolutism flourished on both sides of the Channel, is to challenge not only the old Whig interpretation of English history but also the newer views of so-called revisionists. True, the revisionists often say that they reject Whig ideas. But in fact they adopt some of the central contentions of the Whigs. In order to set what follows into a broad historiographical context, it may be worthwhile to elaborate a little on this theme. Whig historians of the nineteenth century were keen to emphasize the distinctiveness of England's political development. The Anglo-Saxons, they argued, brought free and democratic institutions into England from their Teutonic forests. Elsewhere in Europe, liberty succumbed to the authoritarianism of popes, kings, and Roman lawyers, but the sea kept foreigners and their unpleasant ways out of England, and there freedom lived on. When the Conqueror came, the old English liberties were for a while in jeopardy.