An eighteenth-century view of Nihil Novi

The following article examines a debate in the mid-1760s over the meaning of the 1505 Statute popularly known as Nihil Novi, one of the constitutional cornerstones of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It focuses on the work of a backwoods country squire, Szczepan Sienicki, whose views may be taken as representative of many of the Polish nobility, in that while he deplored many of the Commonwealth's obvious weaknesses, he was reluctant to embrace any radical measures to rectify them. A desire to have a functioning state while preserving the liberum veto, the very device which prevented Poland from being such a state, was all too characteristic of a nobility whose prerogatives and freedoms were so extensive that their beneficiaries constantly feared their undermining, mainly by their own monarchs. Sienicki was coming out against the views of Stanislaw Konarski, a uniquely bold Polish exponent of a modernized parliamentarianism and committed advocate of unqualified majority voting, something Sienicki and his ilk found almost too disturbing to contemplate. The debate, in characteristic terms, was over a hallowed ancestral achievement—the 1505 law—and over its true meaning. Even during the great, reforming parliament of 1788–92, Polish nobles were to find the principle of unqualified majority voting along English lines a difficult one to accept

Commonwealth · Epistemology · Law and economics · Meaning (existential · Nobility · Parliament · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science · Statute · European Political History Analysis · Historical and Cultural Studies of Poland · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies