For more than a decade, there has not been a collection on absolutism in the German-speaking world. This reflects a diminishing interest in this classic German research topic, but also the fact that the era of European absolutism has recently become a domain for social, economic, and mental history research approaches. Institutions, princes, officials, armies, and officers as actors in historical events, the power state and its political ideas have taken a back seat, overshadowed by the social, economic, and cultural realities in which they were embedded and that make them understandable. The contributions included in this volume focus on those structural features of absolutism that particularly reflect how the absolute.