Absolutism: 1660-1789 a political theory that encouraged rulers to claim complete sovereignty within their territories. To seventeenth and eighteenth century absolutists, complete sovereignty meant that a ruler could make law, dispense justice, create and direct a bureaucracy, declare war, and levy taxation without the formal approval of any other governing authorities. Frequently, such absolutist rulers claimed to govern their territories by the same divine right that established a father’s absolute authority over his household. Absolutist monarchs sought to gather into their own hands command of the state’s armed forces, control over its legal system, and the right to collect and spend the state’s financial resources at will. To achieve these goals, they also needed to create an efficient, centralized bureaucracy that owed its allegiance directly to the monarch himself. The legally privileged estates of nobility and clergy, the political authority of semi-autonomous regions, and the pretensions of independent-minded representative assemblies were all obstacles, in the eyes of absolutists, to strong, centralized monarchical government.