ABSTRACT
Ideally bureaucratic absolutism was based on the concept of an impartiality and justice, detached from all social ties and conflicts of interest, that found their place and their realization in the state. ‘In the state’ meant in a prince who in Christian responsibility and under divine guidance was committed solely to the common good and who in his actions was dispensed from observing the laws, in particular the common law evolved by and out of society. The implementation of the liberal-capitalist economic system from above by the monarchical-absolutist state led not only to an entrenchment but even, so far as the top level was concerned, to a strengthening of the traditional social hierarchy. Politics ‘proper’, that is, foreign affairs, was made to seem a sort of separate sphere requiring a degree of expertise and knowledge quite out of the ordinary, indeed almost a kind of superior wisdom regarding the special secrets of successful dominion, the arcana imperii.
