Elite Conflict and State Formation in 16th- and 17th-Century England and France
批评阶级冲突、相对自主性和国家中心论等绝对主义理论，提出精英冲突（教士、君主及其官员、世俗地主）是解释英法绝对主义不同发展路径的关键。
Class conflict, relative autonomy, and state-centered theories of absolutism are critiquedfor their inability to isolate causal factors that could explain the differing patterns of state formation in England and France, culminating in the crown's defeat in the English Civil War of 1640-46 and the French monarch's victory over aristocratic rebels in the Frondes of 1648-53. This article argues that conflicts among the three principal elites-the clergy, monarchs and their officials, and lay landlords-are the critical dynamic that explains the contrasting developments of absolutism in the two countries. English monarchs won a horizontal national-level hegemony over rival elites at the cost of access to resources at the point of production, leaving them vulnerable to a class-based rebellion by landowners. In France, elites were amalgamated into an absolutist state by their conflicts, and thereby lost their separate identities as feudal exploiters as well as the opportunity to transform agrarian social relations to their sole advantage.