ABSOLUTISM • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Absolutism

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/ˈæbsəlˌutˌɪzəm/ Listen

Absolutism

noun

Dominance through threat of punishment and violence. Synonyms: despotism, tyranny.

A form of government in which the ruler is an absolute dictator (not restricted by a constitution or laws or opposition etc.). Synonyms: authoritarianism, Caesarism, despotism, dictatorship, monocracy, one-man rule, shogunate, Stalinism, totalitarianism, tyranny.

The principle of complete and unrestricted power in government. Synonyms: totalism, totalitarianism.

The doctrine of an absolute being.

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Etymology of 'Absolutism'

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"Absolutism" Quotes from Famous Books

... outbreak of the present war he again illustrated his spirit of fanatical absolutism, which at times inspires him, by saying to ...

— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck

... having painfully selected the phrase from a "Dictionary Of Polite English for Public Purposes" edited by a College graduate at present in the Andamans. True, later it had called him an "overbearing and insane procrastinator"—"an apostle of absolutism"—and, plum of all literary gleanings, since it left so much to the imagination of the native reader,—"laudator temporis acti." But that the was because he had withdrawn his private subscription prior to suspending the paper sine die under paragraph so-and-so of the Act for ...

— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy

... education and bad institutions. This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism. A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the beginning of a new dispensation. It was the great counter-principle to asceticism in life and morals, to formalism in art, to absolutism in the social ordering, to obscurantism in thought. Every social improvement since has been the outcome of that doctrine in one form or another. The conviction that the character and lot of man are indefinitely modifiable for good, was the indispensable antecedent to any general ...

— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... nephew, Friedrich Wilhelm II, while the rigour of bureaucratic administration, controlled by a monarchical absolutism, continued and was even accentuated, the absence of the able hand of Friedrich the Great soon made itself apparent. As regards external policy, however, Prussia, while allowing territories on the left bank of the ...

— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... this latter theory that the University of Paris, then the first university in Europe, had just appealed from the Pope to a General Council. In Germany opinions were on the whole divided between this and the theory of Papal absolutism. Again, the view that neither the decisions of a Council nor of a Pope were ipso facto infallible, but that an appeal therefrom lay to a council possibly better informed, had already been advanced with impunity by writers of the ...

— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

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