Ideas of Liberty in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Home , Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, Rzeczpospolita, Sarmatism

©Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski, Przemyśl, 20 October 2017

Neither Józef Piłsudski nor Roman Dmowski were enthusiasts for the liberty enjoyed by the nobility in the old Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita). Piłsudski associated his opponents with the worst traditions of the past:

Poland, Poles themselves have claimed, subsists by anarchy. Poland means private interest, Poland means ill will. Poland means anarchy […] a nation of anarchy, powerlessness, licence, a nation which was led to its downfall by private interest, which could accept no authority.

According to Dmowski,

Whereas elsewhere appropriate elements, trained in the school of absolutism, got used to subordinating themselves to the needs of the state, our nobility distinguished itself by extreme political liberalism, set itself in opposition to the state, stood in defence of liberties. Because there was no étatiste element, which would have created a counter-balance to the liberalism of the nobility, which would have defended the state against it, we lacked the political equilibrium necessary for the normal development of the state, and in consequence the fall of Poland followed.

These great rivals agreed that liberty had degenerated into licence and anarchy, causing Poland to fall (at the hands of her neighbours). This view was held by most Polish historians from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, well before it was incorporated into the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist worldview imposed after the Second World War.

Since the late 1960s, however, the values and principles underpinning the Commonwealth’s political system have been re-evaluated and

©Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski, Przemyśl, 20 October 2017 rehabilitated. Much of this has been done by historians based abroad. However, still more has come from scholars, essayists and politicians within Poland. The quality is uneven, but the best work has shown the relevance of political ideas expressed and practised in the Commonwealth to wider phenomena of liberty in the early modern world.

To some extent this development has corresponded to the ‘republican turn’ among Anglophone historians of ideas. This is especially associated with the ‘Cambridge School’ led by Quentin Skinner and John Pocock. The significance of this school is twofold. First, methodological. The Cambridge School emphasizes the reading of political texts in their own linguistic and intellectual contexts, rather than as timeless and universal contributions to political philosophy. Second, the re-evaluation of early modern republicanism. What Skinner has called ‘a third concept of liberty’ goes beyond the dichotomy famously expressed by Isaiah Berlin, but with much older roots, between liberal, individual, modern or negative freedom on the one hand, and republican, collective, ancient or positive freedom on the other. For early modern republican thinkers, the negative freedom of individuals from coercion was secured from the threat of dominance, by the positive freedom of citizens to make their own laws, and to participate in their own government. Both Skinner and Pocock identify Machiavelli – of the Discourses, rather than the Prince – as a key figure in early modern civic republicanism. He was widely read by Polish-Lithuanian thinkers. They held a similar idea of a wider liberty that protected all particular liberties. Theirs was a durable and coherent concept.

However, at least one important difference can be identified. Most (although not all) Anglophone scholars have taken a secular approach to early modern republicanism. This may be their own preference, or it may echo the

©Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski, Przemyśl, 20 October 2017 conviction of some Renaissance humanists that Christianity was inimical to the military virtù necessary to the citizen army of the republican polis.

In contrast, confessional and religious factors have informed much (although not all) of the ‘republican turn’ in Poland. On the one hand, we see an identification of republicanism with Reformation and anti-clerical discourses, with a tendency to associate supporters of stronger royal authority with Counter-Reformation Catholicism. From here it is but one step to an apologia for a tolerant, republican Commonwealth of many faiths, many cultures and many nations. This does indeed help many projects for fraternity and reconciliation, but has little in common with the robust co-existence of confessions and communities in the old Commonwealth. Nor does it explain the grudging toleration – that is, suffering – of religious minorities by the Catholic majority, that replaced the agreement among equals to uphold religious peace in the 1573 confederacy of Warsaw.

One the other hand, we see, especially among those writers on the national and Catholic wing of Polish politics, a tendency to emphasize collective or national freedom in early modern Polish republicanism at the expense of individual liberties. This essentially modern interpretation of republican freedom is contrasted with ‘liberal freedom’ and associated with militant Catholicism. A symbiosis symbolized by the confederacy of Bar. This approach does take Sarmatism seriously, but it downplays some seminal non-Catholic thinkers and statesmen, starting with Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski. It also ignores the practice of republican citizenship among Orthodox, Lutheran and Jewish urban communities, not to mention the Zaporozhian Cossacks.

Both these tendencies lead to anachronism and distortion if pushed too far in the service of political causes. They also flatten out changes over time. I shall now briefly sketch two major changes of emphasis between the sixteenth

©Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski, Przemyśl, 20 October 2017 and eighteenth centuries. I should add here that political argument in the Commonwealth was steeped in ancient Roman history. Especially pertinent were the conflicts between patricians and plebeians, and the transformation of the Republic into the Empire.

The first of these developments concerns balance. It was axiomatic that the Res Publica was an Aristotelian forma mixta. This idea brought together elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy in the three parliamentary estates. Some writers – such as the future bishop of Poznań, Wawrzyniec Goślick, – stressed the precariousness of the balance between the monarchic and democratic elements. Democratic libertas had a tendency to fall into licence. On the other hand, monarchic maiestas degenerated into tyranny. It therefore fell to the senators to maintain the balance. Goślicki’s treatise De optimo senatore circulated widely beyond the Commonwealth. For those who saw the chief danger in unrestrained libertas, an alliance between monarch and senators was entirely natural. In this way even those writers termed ‘regalists’ advocated a balanced Commonwealth, and not an absolute, sovereign monarchy.

For their opponents, however, all kings aimed at absolutum dominium, while corrupt aristocracy became oligarchy. Libertas could be maintained by defending the democratic element in the Res Publica. This underpinned the institution of royal election by any nobleman who turned up in person, during the election of 1573. This conviction can also be found in the rebellion against King Sigismund III and his aristocratic and Jesuit supporters in 1606-09.

In the eighteenth century, however, the idealization of the forma mixta began to give way to the conviction that Poland’s aurea libertas had to be protected at all costs from the monarch and sometimes the senate as well. The Commonwealth was increasingly described as having a ‘republican

©Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski, Przemyśl, 20 October 2017 government’. At the same time the malfunctioning of its institutions became hard to ignore, leading to postulates for their ‘repair’.

The key tendency was for resolving the struggle inter maiestas ac libertatem in favour of the latter. Throughout the century, from the works of the Calvinist Stanisław Dunin Karwicki until the Four Years Parliament, we can find proposals to remove the corrupting powers of the king, and reduce the role of the senate. It might then be possible to restrict or even abolish that hallowed safeguard – the liberum veto. Perhaps even elective monarchy could be replaced by hereditary succession. So our first shift is from the balanced forma mixta to ‘republican government’.

The second shift, which took place in the second half of the eighteenth century, concerned the idea of liberty itself. The traditional understanding of freedom as an umbrella for particular liberties and privileges lent itself to the prevention of dangerous ‘novelties’. But the wider tendency to reconceive liberty as the natural right of every human being had two consequences.

The first might be called a modern approach to republicanism. Much influenced by Rousseau, it involved an activist approach to the articulation and execution of the ‘national will’ – with the ‘nation’ conceived far more widely than hitherto. Hugo Kołłątaj, especially, would explore the potential for fundamental changes. For Stanisław Staszic, this modern republican concept of liberty involved the extreme subordination of the individual to the nation.

The second, less popular approach, was much influenced by Montesquieu’s famous remedy against the danger of despotism – monarchist or republican – through the concentration of power in the same hands. It was also inspired by the example of Great Britain. Such was the approach taken by King Stanisław August and his supporters. Writers such as Józef Pawlikowski argued that a stronger executive, led by the monarch, was needed to balance

©Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski, Przemyśl, 20 October 2017 the omnipotence of the legislature and protect the weaker orders of society – including the clergy – from the licence of the nobility and the magnates. In this way all inhabitants of the Commonwealth could enjoy their property and natural liberty in tranquillity and security.

Both these approaches, grounded in natural rights, tended to widen the nation – and its freedom – beyond the nobility. They were synthesized brilliantly in the Constitution of 3 May 1791. This enshrined the separation of powers and realized the king’s old dream of an effective executive in partnership with a reinvigorated legislature. At the same time it opened clear perspectives for the enjoyment of civil liberty by all members of the nation, and for active participation in government by those citizens with the necessary property, education and will.

The Commonwealth, I argue, was very well prepared for the challenges of the nineteenth century. And for this very reason it was destroyed by the neighbouring absolutist monarchies.