Policing the Subject: Confessional Absolutism and Communal Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century Austria
If proverbial wisdom predicts longevity to the falsely proclaimed dead, then the paradigm of absolutism and its confessional variant must surely be considered a prime example. Having drawn intense fire from scholars of Western Europe over the past two decades, the concept of absolutism has recently been given a fresh lease of life by research, exploring and, to some extent, vindicating its applicability in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Central Europe. Given the evolutionary nature of the making of the early modern Austrian-Habsburg monarchy, the complexity of its constitutional, religious, and ethnic makeup, and the waywardness of some of its governing personnel, it seems doubtful if future research will ever be able to satisfactorily clarify the relationship between the political aspirations of individual Austrian rulers, among whom Ferdinand II arguably made the most serious bid for absolute rule, and the practice of negotiated power that characterized the normal state of relations between the Crown and the monarchy's estates.