From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishabsolutismab‧so‧lut‧is‧m /ˈæbsəluːtɪzəm/ noun [uncountable] PGa political system in which a ruler has complete power and authority
Examples from the Corpus
absolutism• The state bureaucracies created by eighteenth-century absolutism signified the arrival of a universal class pursuing a universal interest.• The result would, at best, have been clerical absolutism, at worst, Communist takeover or civil war.• The tendency to ethnic absolutism and the one-party residue have reinforced one another in the Yugoslav successor states.• But we do all recognise that without that balance, in certain instances, absolutism can easily spill over into extremism.• Few today would hold any brief for a theory, such as Bodin's, serving to justify absolutism.• By paving the way for a national free market, absolutism fostered capitalism.• Since the 1960s there has been a marked shift from moral absolutism to relativism.• Some of the absolutism of the early days of social investing seems to have given way to a new pragmatic activism. 