Emperor joseph ii enlightened absolutism prussia
•
Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor
Holy Roman Emperor from 1765 to 1790
"Joseph II" redirects here. For other uses, see Joseph II (disambiguation).
Joseph II (13 March 1741 – 20 February 1790) was Holy Roman Emperor from 18 August 1765 and sole ruler of the Habsburg monarchy from 29 November 1780 until his death. He was the eldest son of Empress Maria Theresa and her husband, Emperor Francis I, and the brother of Marie Antoinette, Leopold II, Maria Carolina of Austria, and Maria Amalia, Duchess of Parma. He was thus the first ruler in the Austrian dominions of the union of the Houses of Habsburg and Lorraine, styled Habsburg-Lorraine.
Joseph was a proponent of enlightened absolutism like his brother Leopold II; however, his commitment to secularizing, liberalizing and modernizing reforms resulted in significant opposition, which resulted in failure to fully implement his programs. Meanwhile, despite making some territorial gains, his reckless foreign policy badly isolated Austri
•
Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor (2nd Half of the 18th Century)
The son of Maria Theresa (r. 1740-80), Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (r. 1765-90) was one of the leading representatives of “enlightened absolutism.” He was responsible for many significant reforms, including the abolition of juridical serfdom (1781) and the issuance of an edict of toleration for the Jews (1782). His reform efforts – partly inspired by power-political aims, partly by enlightenment principles – focused on a variety of areas such as administration, social policy, agriculture, and the judiciary, where torture was abolished as a judicial tool in 1777. In contrast to his mother, Joseph pursued the reform course impetuously, antagonizing established circles like the nobility and clergy with his centralist and anti-corporativist policies. Resistance from these circles forced him to abandon some reforms toward the end of his reign; other reforms were revoked after his death. In foreign policy, he initially s
•
The “Enlightened Absolutism” of the Eighteenth Century
If “enlightened absolutism,” also called “enlightened despotism,” sounds like a contradiction in terms, it is. At the time, though, it seemed like an improvement over the system of power bygd divine right, where rulers had little concern for the people under them. In practice, it offered only inconsistent improvements, and it modernized the justification for concentrating power in the ruler. In the twentieth century, Germany and Russia came under two of the most brutal authoritarian states in history, partly because of the examples their eighteenth-century predecessors set.
The Enlightenment strongly affected European thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the doctrine of divine right didn’t passform well with its emphasis on reason. Monarchs began to företräda the state as a machine requiring central direction, which they provided. The most prominent advocate of this view was Thomas Hobbes, who claimed an absolute