ABSTRACT
The idea that there was something recognisably modern about absolute monarchy appears in many different forms. At its simplest it rests on the conviction that centralisation and bureaucratisation were the essential features of the modern state. In this case absolutism might be thought to be a long way down the modernising path. Some historians have no difficulty in detecting the growth of bureaucracy in medieval times and its first flowering in the ‘national and territorial’ states of the Renaissance.2
It is not too difficult to underpin an empirical and gradualist approach to the emergence of the modern state with a modest injection of Weberian sociology to give it a bit more precision. In assessing the development of the French foreign ministry between 1698 and 1715 John Rule appealed to explicitly Weberian criteria:
