Common Wealth, Common Good

This is an analysis of Polish political thought and opinion in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, based on published pamphlets and books and manuscript sources. The latter are chiefly the records of the proceedings of the regional assemblies of the gentry (sejmiki). The secondary literature, in Polish and English, is invoked continuously in a sort of dialogue throughout the text. The author, Benedict Wagner-Rundell, contends that the ideas, proposals and reform programmes of that period merit serious analysis. That is, Polish political thought of the early eighteenth century should not be dismissed as merely a reactionary celebration of anarchy. While the main body of this short text (Chapters Two to Six) presents a close analysis of various specific proposals and programmes in publications and in debates in the regional assemblies and the national parliament (sejm), the author argues that a shared set of paradigmatic ideas underlay the different proposals and all sides of the debates among the Polish gentry (szlachta). At the heart of these ideas, he maintains, besides liberty, was virtue, that is, public virtue, even republican virtue—the obligation of citizens to sacrifice their needs for the good of the collective

Aesthetics · Gentry · Obligation · Parliament · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Reactionary · Sociology · Virtue · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity