Domestic policies of Frederick II

In administrative, economic, and social policy Frederick’s attitudes were essentially conservative. Much of what he did in these areas was little more than a development of policies pursued by his father. He justified these policies in terms of the rationalizing rhetoric of “enlightened despotism,” whereas the devoutly Protestant Frederick William I had done so in terms of religious obligation, but many of the objectives, and the means used to attain them, were the same. Frederick, in spite of his appalling personal relationship with his father, admired him as a ruler and freely acknowledged the debt he owed him. “Only his care,” he wrote during the Seven Years’ War, “his untiring work, his scrupulously just policies, his great and admirable thriftiness and the strict discipline he introduced into the army which he himself had created, made possible the achievements I have so far accomplished.”

Like Frederick William I, Frederick thought of kingship as a duty. To him it entailed obligations to be met only by untiring and conscientious work. It was his duty to protect his subjects from foreign attack, to make them prosperous, to give them efficient and honest administration, and to provide them with laws that were simple and adapted to their wants and their particular temperament. In order to achieve these objectives, the ruler must sacrifice his own interests and any purely personal or family feeling. Raison d’état, the needs of the state, took precedence over these and also over the immediate comfort and happiness of his subjects. The ruler could carry out his duties effectively only if he kept the reins of government firmly in his own hands. His rule must be personal. He must not rely on ministers who were likely to be influenced by selfish ambitions or factional feeling and who might well keep important information from their master if they were allowed to. Personal rule alone could produce the unity and consistency essential to any successful policy. In his Anti-Machiavel, a somewhat conventional discussion of the principles of good government published in 1740 just before his accession, Frederick wrote that there were two sorts of princes—those who ruled in person and those who merely relied on subordinates. The former were “like the soul of a state” and “the weight of their government falls on themselves alone, like the world on the back of Atlas,” whereas the second group were mere phantoms. Yet he would have rejected outright, and on the whole with justification, any suggestion that he ruled as a despot. On the contrary, he would have claimed that his power, however great, was exercised only within limits set by law and that the obligations inherent in his position made it impossible for him to govern in an arbitrary way.