The Well-Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Attempt at a Comparative Approach

Abstract

TRADITIONALLY, WESTERN HISTORIOGRAPHY traces the origins of the so-called modern world to the Enlightenment and the revolutionary waves, political and economic, at the end of the eighteenth century. These eighteenthcentury origins are related to the rise of a new social class and its triumph over the ancien regime as a precondition for the unfolding of the two major aspects of modern civilization-capitalism and statism. But is this view not oversimple? We historians know all too well-and recent scholarship repeatedly reminds us of it-that the past is much more tenacious than public opinion imagines it to be. Little of the past is ever fully lost, though its dynamic role may change and its forms be transmuted. With respect to state policy and administration, the question arises whether the new ideas of the Enlightenment and the interests of a rising middle class helped to shape the actions of rulers and governments before the French Revolution. Was not the enlightened despotism (or "absolutism," as I would prefer to call it) such a response to intellectual and social pressures? But the very contradiction inherent in the notion of enlightened absolutism doomed the effort to failure and opened the way to the storm of