Unspoken Assumptions: Voice and Absolutism at the Court of Louis XIV |
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Authors: | Chandra Mukerji |
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Affiliation: | University of California, San Diego |
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Abstract: | This paper indicates how what Norbert Elias described as the disciplining of the aristocracy in 17th-century France, which he took to be essential to the ascendancy of Louis XIV and the growth of the modern state, was itself part of a broader pattern of voiceless politics. The French political bureaucracy and the monarch in this period were able to accumulate power by restraining public political speech, and using a combination of rituals of subjugation and material forms like fortresses to exemplify the power and social efficacy of this political regime. The result was a new form of power, importantly demonstrated in the land and its people: what we have come to call the territorial state. |
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