ABSTRACT
It remains to be seen whether anything changed to mark eighteenthcentury absolutism as a distinct and ‘final’ phase, and whether it contained elements that can explain the preservation of monarchical rule into the nineteenth century. Unlike absolutism, the term ‘enlightened despotism’ (despotisme éclairé) dates to the period it purports to describe, having been coined in 1767 by the French liberal economists known as physiocrats. Though rejected by Rousseau and other contemporaries, it was resurrected as ‘enlightened absolutism’ in 1847 to describe the last part of Roscher’s three-stage developmental model encountered in Chapter 1. The new term did not displace despotism entirely and both provide convenient labels for two contrasting interpretations of later absolute monarchy.
