absolutism, absolutist state A state-form typical of societies in the process of transition from feudalism to capitalism and in which power is concentrated in the person of a monarch, who has at his or her disposal a centralized administrative apparatus. Viewed thus, the label has been applied to a wide variety of states, ranging from that of the 16th-century English Tudors to that of 19th-century Meiji Japan. This definition is, however, not uncontroversial: the label has also been applied to Tsarist Russia, where the transition was from feudalism to communism, and some would deny that Japan was ever a feudal society in anything other than the loosest sense. A useful overview can be found in Perry Anderson's Lineages of the Absolute State (1974).
There has also been great controversy about the role that such states played in the transition to...
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