In his best-known work, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes compares a country to a body, with a monarch as the head who could raise armies and funds independent of the sovereign, councils or parliaments that insisted on being heard, merchants and financiers who were more interested in profit than in paying taxes or serving political interests, towns that claimed immunity from certain controls, and frequent peasant uprisings Religious institutions, which were often wealthy and had great influence over the population, could also be tenacious in defending their independence from temporal authority In essence, the idea of an absolute ruler was developed as one solution to these problems Rather than living in constant fear of their antagonists, or being forced to share power with them, an absolute monarch could create and maintain a powerful kingdom and rule it effectively absolutism, European james ii One of the problems with the study of royal absolutism in history is that too often the term absolute was used in a pejorative sense by those who opposed a particular ruler This was true of both internal and external conflicts In the 1680s, for example, the groups in England who opposed the policies of James II accused him of attempting to establish an absolute monarchy that would disregard Parliament, reimpose Catholicism, and generally strip his subjects of their rights and liberties The English would also apply this label to Louis XIV in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when England fought two wars against France Even the term absolutism to describe a particular style of government was not coined until after the French Revolution, with the explicit purpose of discrediting the ancien régime The concept of a powerful ruler in a centralized state was not always viewed in a negative light, especially among some intellectuals of the 16th through 18th centuries Three thinkers closely associated with the development of absolutism as a political theory are Jean Bodin (1530–96), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704) Each was deeply influenced by the political circumstances of his time Bodin and Hobbes were examining the nature of authority when it had clearly broken down; Bossuet was justifying a system developed in reaction to such crises, but which itself was subject to challenge Although their ideas were not necessarily representative of the opinions of their contemporaries, or of the realities of statecraft in early modern Europe, each work was widely known and read in its time and afterward Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth first appeared in 1576, in the midst of the French Wars of Religion Bodin undertook a sweeping study of various forms of government, taking care to distinguish between what he called royal monarchy, despotic monarchy, and tyranny Despots generally violated the property rights of their subjects; tyrants were arbitrary and purely selfish Royal monarchy meant that a ruler, although entirely sovereign, would always seek to rule in the best interests of his subjects There were no formal constitutional checks on power, but a paternal sense of duty to the welfare of the kingdom would guide the ruler’s actions parliaments The other limit on royal power evident in Bodin’s own time was the legislative or consultative body, such as the Estates General and parlements of France All such legislative bodies claimed some rights and privileges