ABSTRACT
When confessionalisation possessed a territorial State, government became a programme of redemption. Given the conflict of confessions, the result was civil war fought for Christian principles but uncontrollable by any known legal or administrative instrument. The Absolutist State was the remarkable political response: a concerted attempt by administrative intellectuals and Statist lawyers to separate religion from government, morality from law, theology from public administration. The State or prince was not absolute in the sense of resolving ultimate questions of theology or pursuing the salvation of souls. They were absolute in the sense that their political judgments had social finality in the form of a raison d’état which made the peace and the order of the State the ultimate value. The received idea of Absolutism merits revision in two respects at least.1
