Bodin's "contradiction" points up a significant deformation in the integrity of the supposedly unlimited political body, with its constant assertions of divine sovereignty. King Francois I of France, a contemporary of Ivan Ill's, in desperate need of money, did not, for example, plunder Marseilles, as any despot would have done in his place (and as Ivan the Terrible did in an analogous situation by pillaging Novgorod), but instead put judicial offices up for sale, thereby involuntarily creating a new privileged stratum—that of hereditary judges—and a new institution, the parliaments. The very fact that these offices were bought, and, consequently, that the government was trusted, and that even in the deepest tyrannical twilight of France these privileges were never violated, is of primary historical importance—a kind of institutional materialization of the apparently ephemeral political paradox of absolutism. Here is how Professor N. Kareev describes this phenomenon: "The unlimited monarchy was compelled to tolerate around itself autonomous corporations of hereditary judges: each of them and all of them together could perhaps be sent wherever the king liked, but they could not be expelled from their posts, because this would have meant ... to violate the right of property."™ Bodin, in formulating his contradiction, was simply summarizing the actual practice of his time. And this practice showed that absolutism was compelled to tolerate economic limitations on power.
The presence of these economic limitations, making possible autonomous economic activity on the part of producers, excluded permanent stagnation, and made absolutism capable of fundamental economic modernization and expanded reproduction of the gross national product. The capacity for economic progress characteristic of absolutist structures was combined with their capacity for political dynamism, and for what could be called expanded political reproduction. Their gradual transformation into democratic structures leaves no doubt of this.
In place of the reduction and polarization of social forces characteristic of despotism, absolutism was marked by a multiplicity of social strata. Variety and inequality were its hallmarks. Not immobility and uniformity, but, on the contrary, social and economic differentiation of the peasantry, its constant migration into the cities, and, consequently, urbanization and the formation of a strong middle class, were the leading processes in absolutist societies.
The rapid horizontal mobility in absolutist structures was logically accompanied by well-ordered vertical mobility, based on social limitations of power. In practical terms, this meant that the elevation of the new bureaucratic elite of absolutism brought with it not the dissolution of the hereditary aristocracy in universal service, but a competitive struggle between old and new elites. This constitutes one of the most dramatic differences between absolutism and despotism. Despite the multiplicity of conflicts and the constant, sometimes bloody and cruel struggle of the elites, absolutism agreed to coexist with aristocracy, while despotism did not allow it to come into existence.
This not only assured the members of the absolutist elite of the right to "political death" (and thereby deprived their struggle of the character of a brutal fight for physical survival), but also created the very possibility of a political struggle, and therefore the mechanism for correcting mistakes in administration, not to speak of powerful sources of independent thought and behavior.
At this point, we may perhaps express a cautious hypothesis: just as the existence of the middle class, being a function of economic limitations, created the possibility of transforming absolutism into democracy, so the existence of the aristocracy, being a function of social limitations, prevented the transformation of absolutist structures into despotism. In other words, just as democracy is impossible without a middle class, so absolutism is impossible without an aristocracy.
For despotism, as we have seen, ideological robbery was the other side of robbery of property. The political practice of absolutism gives us the opportunity to prove this theorem, as the mathematicians say, from the inverse. Namely: the absence of robbery of property should lead to the absence of ideological robbery. And, in fact, not being subject to permanent corruption—in other words, not fearing the destruction of its power at any moment—absolutism did not see a mortal threat in the multiplicity of ideas. It therefore spared not only the material potential of the country, but also its intellectual potential, and made no attempt at an ideological monopoly. That is, along with administrative and political functions, it did not also perform an ideological one.
Recognizing the latent limitations on power, absolutism thereby involuntarily promoted the coming into being of a political opposition—that is, the working out of alternative models of political organization. The existence of reformist potential and of alternative models, in turn, made qualitative change in the system possible. It developed out of its own resources.
This excluded terror as a universal means of administration. In Europe, as Herzen once said, there was also terror, but it did not occur to anyone to flog Spinoza or to induct Lessing into the army. Even in Spain, which "deviated" in the direction of tyranny more than other European countries, a place was found for Cervantes and Lope de Vega. England knew the heavy hand of Henry VIII and the horrors of Bloody Mary, but for all that, the Utopia of Thomas More and the Novum Organum of Bacon were written there. France, which saw the massacre of the Huguenots by the Catholics, also found room for Rabelais and Montaigne.
This, of course, does not mean that in the despotic states, during the times of individual "enlightened despots," there were not court astronomers and poets who sometimes achieved great successes in the politically insensitive areas of art and science. The culture of despotism tolerated good poetry and medicine, preserved the works of Aristotle, and created great religious philosophies—which, however, preached not the transformation of reality but escape from it as from an embodiment of chaos. It was a politically mute culture.
Naturally, a certain degree of divergence between the goals of the administration and those of the system is characteristic of all authoritarian structures without exception. Partly for this reason, absolutist governments always found themselves under financial stress, owed gigantic debts, and were never able to achieve a normal balance of income and expenditures. A financial cul-de-sac occasioned the calling of the Long Parliament which ended by sending King Charles I to the block, and the same is true of the Estates General which ended by guillotining Louis XVI. The Austrian constitutional bodies also owed their origin to a financial collapse combined with a military defeat. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the interest on the British national debt was equal to the entire expenditures on the army and navy, and the debt of Austria exceeded its annual income three-and-a-half times, while in France the national debt was eighteen times the annual revenues of the state. Such was the disordered financial system of absolutism, which originated for the most part in ruinous wars, unskilled management, and vestiges of medieval organization in the economy, which obviously contradicted the goals of the system.
Despotism did not know any of this. It did not live on credit, since no one would have extended a penny's worth of credit to it. It lived by constant robbery of its own people. And thus, it was not only parasitic on the body of the system, as was absolutism, but systematically disorganized the system, not allowing it to stand on its feet.