ABSTRACT
Probably no piety in the historiography of Germany is more commonly encountered than that which describes the century and a half following the Peace of Westphalia as the period of the development and heyday of princely autocracy in the German territorial states; here as elsewhere in Europe, in other words, it was ‘the age of absolutism’. Actually, there is nothing very wrong with this view, which as a generalization is acceptable as long as two important qualifications are kept in mind: first, that ‘absolutism’ itself is a term of convenience and a somewhat slippery one, whose precise meaning varied greatly in the concrete circumstances of even those territories where it can be applied more or less correctly; and second, that absolutism did not develop in all German territories and that where it did its growth was often uneven and sometimes self-contradictory.
