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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
absolutism
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ But we do all recognise that without that balance, in certain instances, absolutism can easily spill over into extremism.
▪ By paving the way for a national free market, absolutism fostered capitalism.
▪ Few today would hold any brief for a theory, such as Bodin's, serving to justify absolutism.
▪ Since the 1960s there has been a marked shift from moral absolutism to relativism.
▪ Some of the absolutism of the early days of social investing seems to have given way to a new pragmatic activism.
▪ The result would, at best, have been clerical absolutism, at worst, Communist takeover or civil war.
▪ The state bureaucracies created by eighteenth-century absolutism signified the arrival of a universal class pursuing a universal interest.
▪ The tendency to ethnic absolutism and the one-party residue have reinforced one another in the Yugoslav successor states.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Absolutism

Absolutism \Ab"so*lu`tism\, n.

  1. The state of being absolute; the system or doctrine of the absolute; the principles or practice of absolute or arbitrary government; despotism.

    The element of absolutism and prelacy was controlling.
    --Palfrey.

  2. (Theol.) Doctrine of absolute decrees.
    --Ash.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
absolutism

1753 in theology; 1830 in politics, in which sense it was first used by British reformer and parliamentarian Maj. Gen. Thomas Perronet Thompson (1783-1869). See absolute and \n -ism.

Wiktionary
absolutism

n. 1 (context theology English) Doctrine of preordination; doctrine of absolute decrees; doctrine that God acts in an absolute manner. (First attested in the mid 18th century.)(R:SOED5: page=9) 2 (context political science English) The principles or practice of absolute or arbitrary government; despotism. (First attested in the early 19th century.) 3 (context philosophy English) Belief in a metaphysical absolute; belief in Absolute. (First attested in the late 19th century.) 4 positiveness; the state of being absolute. 5 (lb en rare) The characteristic of being absolute in nature or scope; absoluteness.

WordNet
absolutism
  1. n. dominance through threat of punishment and violence [syn: tyranny, despotism]

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

  3. the principle of complete and unrestricted power in government [syn: totalitarianism, totalism]

  4. the doctrine of an absolute being

Wikipedia
Absolutism

The term absolutism may refer to:

  • Absolute monarchy, a form of government where the monarch has the power to rule their land freely, with no laws or legally organized direct opposition in force. This term is especially applied to a period in European history, known as the Age of Absolutism (c. 1610 – c. 1789), a historiographical term used to describe a form of monarchical power.
    • Enlightened absolutism, the actions of absolute rulers who were influenced by the Enlightenment (18th- and early 19th-century Europe)
  • Absolute space, a theory holding that space exists absolutely, in contrast to relationalism, which holds that space exists only as relations between objects
  • Absolute (philosophy), the doctrine of the Absolute, which holds that an objective and unconditioned reality underlies the perceptional objects
  • Absolute truth, the contention that in a particular domain of thought, all statements in that domain are either absolutely true or absolutely false
  • Autocracy (also known as "political absolutism"), a political theory which argues that one person should hold all power
  • Moral absolutism, the position that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions are either good or evil, regardless of the context of the act
  • Absolute idealism, an ontologically monistic philosophy attributed to G.W.F. Hegel. It is Hegel's account of how being is ultimately comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole
  • Graded absolutism, the view that a moral absolute, such as "Do not kill", can be greater or lesser than another moral absolute, such as "Do not lie"

Usage examples of "absolutism".

Bismarck and Cavour seized the opportunity of making extremely useful for Germany and Italy the irrelevant and vacillating idealism and the timid absolutism of the third Napoleon.

Among other results was the ease with which German Protestantism became the instrument of royal and princely absolutism from the sixteenth century until the kings and princes were overthrown in 1918.

Ego and Eco were still staring at each other across an unbridgeable gulf, and the two absolutisms were altogether incompatible.

So he got rid of those ministers identified with the muscular absolutism of his grandfather and replaced them with reformers who would somehow conjure up changes that might be both politically liberal and fiscally copious.

Their arid soil gave little scope to the territorial magnate, who was excluded from politics by the growing absolutism of the dynasty, and the government found it well to employ at a distance forces that might be turbulent at home.

Ego and Eco were still staring at each other across an unbridgeable gulf, and the two absolutisms were altogether incompatible.

If immediately, then God governs in them as he does in the church, and no man is free to think or act contrary to popular opinion, or in any case to question the wisdom or justice of any of the acts of the state, which is arriving at state absolutism by another process.

This new theory transfers to society the sovereignty which that asserted for the individual, and asserts social despotism, or the absolutism of the state.

Christian tradition, which once supported political absolutism, was reinterpreted to accept the democratic ideal.

The French communities that grew in the midst of those naked timocrats, whose savagery they soothed by beads and crucifixes and weapons, were the plantings of absolutism paternalistic to the last degree.

I should have assumed towards a court which stands aloof from all the courts in the world for its unbounded absolutism.

The sound of these chimes brought back to Nekhludoff's mind what he had read in the notes of the Decembrists [the Decembrists were a group who attempted, but failed, to put an end to absolutism in Russia at the time of the accession of Nicholas the First] about the way this sweet music repeated every hour re-echoes in the hearts of those imprisoned for life.

Captain Alston had impressed him as the type who enforced regulations with an old-fashioned absolutism.