Modern states, in the sense we use the term today, did not truly emerge in Europe until the seventeenth century. Before that, a king might have been sovereign in theory, but in practice his authority was fragmented and constantly constrained. The Church exercised independent power over the same territory. Supranational institutions—religious orders, imperial structures, transregional elites—operated alongside royal authority. Within each realm there were also powerful actors capable of openly resisting the monarch.
A telling example comes from late fifteenth-century Bohemia. In 1483, the citizens of Prague gravely insulted and enraged King Vladislaus II of Hungary and Bohemia. By any modern standard, this would have justified a decisive show of force. Yet the king lacked the financial capacity to raise an army capable of subduing the city. In the end, he had no choice but to forgive the offense magnanimously—not out of mercy, but out of institutional weakness. Sovereignty without administrative and fiscal capacity was little more than theater.
Absolutism emerged precisely as a reaction against this fragmented order. The absolutist state placed real power in the hands of the monarch, enabling the ruler to govern without constant negotiation with rival authorities, estates, guilds, clerical hierarchies, or semi-autonomous cities. In the Czech lands, this period is understandably remembered as dark: political subjugation, cultural loss, declining autonomy, and genuine grievances tied to imperial domination. That memory, however, should not obscure a broader European pattern.
Across much of Europe, absolutism brought more coherent administration, more predictable law, greater internal peace, milder treatment of the population, and systematic support for science, infrastructure, industry, and education. It laid the institutional foundations of the Enlightenment. Contrary to popular myth, most Enlightenment reforms were not initiated by French revolutionaries. They were imposed from above by absolutist rulers who had both the authority and the administrative capacity to modernize their states.
In historical terms, centralized power often delivered greater personal security, rising material prosperity, and—paradoxically—more effective freedom than the chaotic pluralism of competing authorities.
This observation fits uncomfortably well with contemporary experience. Wherever centralized state authority is systematically weakened and “balanced” by an amorphous civil society, activist networks, multinational corporations, and transnational institutions, the result is rarely liberty in any meaningful sense. Instead we see regulatory paralysis, declining public order, erosion of accountability, and a growing sense of insecurity. Power does not disappear; it merely migrates into less visible and less controllable hands.
This does not mean that unlimited centralized power is automatically virtuous. History offers no such simple rule. But it is long past time to abandon the propagandistic cliché that a strong, centralized state is inherently the enemy of freedom. In many cases, it has been the precondition for it.