Liberty's folly: the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth in the eighteenth century, 1697-1795
Choice Reviews Online, 1991
... Liberty's folly: The Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth in the eighteenth century, 1697-1795... more ... Liberty's folly: The Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth in the eighteenth century, 1697-1795. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Lukowski, Jerzy. PUBLISHER: Routledge (London and New York). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1991. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 0415032288 ). ...
Książka Andrei Stieldorf jest nieznacznie uaktualnioną wersją rozprawy habilitacyjnej, przyjętą p... more Książka Andrei Stieldorf jest nieznacznie uaktualnioną wersją rozprawy habilitacyjnej, przyjętą przez Wydział Filozoficzny Reńskiego Uniwersytetu Fryderyka Wilhelma w Bonn w semestrze zimowym 2007/2008 r. Publikacja składa się z przedmowy, wykazu skrótów, źródeł i literatury, wstępu, trzech rozbudowanych rozdziałów, zakończenia oraz indeksu postaci historycznych i nazw geograficznych. W obszernym wstępie uczona przedstawiła stan badań nad państwem, władztwem i państwowością we wczesnym średniowieczu. A. Stieldorf nie zdołała jednak w swym opracowaniu wykorzystać najnowszego podsumowania badań nad tym skomplikowanym zagadnieniem, zawartego w zbiorze studiów Der frühmittelalterliche Staat-europäische Perspektiven 1. Przedstawiła również stan badań nad granicami i marchiami, które w latach trzydziestych i czterdziestych XX w. służyły propagandzie nazistowskiej III Rzeszy, a w okresie powojennym nie cieszyły się większym zainteresowaniem wśród badaczy. Poza rozważaniami uczonej pozostało Królestwo Franków Zachodnich i Italia, ponieważ obszary te charakteryzowały się odmiennymi strukturami władztwa w porównaniu do wschodniofrankijsko-niemieckiej Rzeszy (s. 32-34). Rozdział drugi (pierwszy po numerowanym wstępie), zatytułowany "Marc(h/i)a: Die Peripherie königlicher und kaiserlicher Herrschaft?" (s. 36-187), został poświęcony terminologii źródeł. Późnoantyczne określenia granic, takie jak limes, finis, confinium, terminus, pozostawały w dalszym użyciu we wczesnym średniowieczu. Odnosiły się one jednak głównie do oznaczenia granic pól uprawnych (Izydor z Sewilli) albo granic poszczególnych civitates (Grzegorz z Tours). Wyraz marca/marka występuje w źródłach łacińskojęzycznych od połowy VI w. i pierwotnie mógł się odnosić zarówno do niewielkiej przestrzeni wiejskiej (Lex Baiwariorum z pierwszej połowy VIII w.), jak i do większego obszaru władzy jurysdykcyjnej merowińskiego króla. Znaczenie w sensie obrzeży Rzeszy ("Randzone des Reiches") występuje po raz pierwszy w jednym z listów papieża Hadriana I do Karola Wielkiego, datowanym na ok. 788 r. (s. 47). Dopiero od schyłku VIII w. pojawiają się częściej w historiograficznych tekstach terminus, confinium, limes na
This is a penetrating micro-study of the Spanish monarchy during the conflict over the Spanish su... more This is a penetrating micro-study of the Spanish monarchy during the conflict over the Spanish succession, drilling down into the lives of the men who struggled to keep a once-powerful force going in adversity, but which was now a hollowed-out husk, stretched to and even beyond its limits. The overwhelming impression this book gives is of an empire whose administrators, shipwrights and seafarers knew what was required to be done, who had lively debates over how the tasks they faced should be done, but who lacked the means to do so. The sheer effort required in running a worldwide empire in a pre-industrial age and the inevitable limitations come through with striking clarity. We have here the story of the fitting out of a fleet, from the drawing board to its destruction off Cartagena in 1708. That fleet was to sail from Spain to the Portobelo fairs, on the north Panamanian coast, of the Peruvian viceroyalty. The revenues from these fairs were a crucial component of the income of the Spanish crown, particularly important in a time of war, when Philip V's Spain was in hock to the protective power of France. It is also a story of collective wishful thinking: on the part of the Spanish crown that it could secure these revenues in the face of the hostile fleets of the maritime powers; on the part, in particular of the English, that the wealth of the Spanish Indies was far greater than the reality; on the part of the French, too, who hoped that the Spanish subjects they were defending would readily open their ports and their purses to them. Spain's economic and military weaknesses fed on themselves. To be effective, fleets needed to go to sea. The Tierra Firme fleet, which should have sailed annually to Portobelo, rotted in harbour for years. Spain could only afford the luxury of its sailings in times of peace. The fleet that sailed in 1706 (and tried to return in 1708) was originally scheduled to have gone in 1702; between 1678 and 1700, only four fleets sailed. The English navy had its own manpower problems, it is true, but they were nowhere near on
It seems that politicians and politics have never been regarded with greater contempt across the ... more It seems that politicians and politics have never been regarded with greater contempt across the western world. The expenses scandal in the United Kingdom, the lacerating negative rhetoric of American election campaigns, and, in an age of economic crisis, the growing disjuncture between the promises made by politicians to win elections and their actions while in government, have helped create a corrosive cynicism among voters about the motives and actions of those they elect to lead them. In the United States, the growth of the Tea Party movement has demonstrated a curious mixture of devoted admiration for the founding fathers and the constitution they gave the nation in 1789, and a withering contempt for those who attempt to operate it in very different circumstances two centuries later. It is a good time to publish a study of the last 100 years of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Europe's second-largest state in 1750, which was partitioned out of existence between 1772 and 1795. For the Commonwealth possessed by 1700 one of the most radically consensual political systems ever devised and, as Jerzy Lukowski amply demonstrates in this book, in its decay its political culture displayed very similar symptoms to the modern West: blistering contempt for politicians, deep cynicism about the motives and aims of those in government, ludicrously overblown rhetoric about political opponents, and a debilitating attachment to a venerated political constitution established in a supposedly more virtuous past. For all the weakness of the executive, presided over by an elected monarch stripped of most of the prerogatives enjoyed by his European counterparts, the Commonwealth's noble citizens were as suspicious of Warsaw and the machinations of government ministers as any devotee of Sarah Palin is of Washington's porkbarrel politicians. Yet even if these noble citizens were aware of the Commonwealth's problems, they regarded their political system as the most perfect known to mankind, since, from the 16th century, it had enshrined at its core the liberty of the citizen, while establishing an increasingly elaborate system of control over the king. Despite the disasters which befell the Commonwealth after 1648, when a debilitating cycle of wars fought almost entirely on its own territory ruined its economy, depleted its treasury, and left it after 1717 effectively as a Russian protectorate, its citizens praised their system as the best conceivable, and trusted that it would survive because it was indispensible to the international system. Their world was, as Lukowski shows with characteristic relish, marked by bizarre efflorescences of utopian fantasy, and wishful thinking on an Olympian scale, not least in the dogged attachment to the principle of the liberum veto, by which the
Preface Note on Polish pronunciation List of illustrations List of maps Part I. Poland to 1795: 1... more Preface Note on Polish pronunciation List of illustrations List of maps Part I. Poland to 1795: 1. Piast Poland, ?-1385 2. Jagiellonian Poland, 1385-1572 3. The commonwealth of the two nations, 1572-1795 Part II. Poland after 1795: 4. Challenging the partitions, 1795-1864 5. An era of transformation, 1864-1914 6. Independence regained and lost, 1914-45 7. Communism and the Cold War, 1945-89 8. A new republic 1989- Genealogical charts of Polish rulers Lists of heads of state, presidents, communist party leaders, 1918-2000 Bibliography.
they might be no more than yeomen or rich peasants. 3 In France, gentilhomme was matched by noble... more they might be no more than yeomen or rich peasants. 3 In France, gentilhomme was matched by noble or chevalier or seigneur. In Germany, Adel, nobility, subdivided into Herr (lord), Ritter (knight) or Junker^the last largely applied to nobles of moderate means. In Poland, all nobles, szlachta, were panowie, a word which can be equally unsatisfactorily translated as 'gentlemen', 'rulers' or 'lords'; not unlike the German Herren, the term is so wide that it can be applied to territorial magnates or nearbeggars who could carry o¡ an appropriate front. 'Aristocracy' did not, strictly speaking, refer to a particular social group: it meant, literally, government by 'the best'. That indefatigable traveller and historian Archdeacon William Coxe could describe the Commonwealth of Poland^Lithuania as 'a state of perfect aristocracy' not because of its numerous nobility, but because of the near-untrammelled domination of that state by some two dozen great families. But he also spoke of the 'aristocratic licentiousness' that was destroying that state: aristocracy as a system was shading into a social grouping. For much of the eighteenth century, however, 'the best' meant the great landed nobility, who did indeed govern, and who would, at the very least, have been much put out to be informed that they were not 'the best'. The transformation was more than completed with the French Revolution, at least within France itself. Late in 1788, 'aristocrat' and 'aristocracy' established themselves as terms of opprobrium; and then, at the height of the Revolution, they could be used of all its enemies (real, imagined and contrived), not necessarily just nobles. 4 Imprecision had long been to the fore in the concept of the three 'orders' or 'estates' of society^those who prayed, those who fought, those who laboured. If this notion of oratores, bellatores et laboratores was indeed ¢rst expounded by Aelfric of Eynsham in the tenth century, then it was an echo of an ancient formulation which reached back at least to Plato and Socrates in ancient Greece. But whether invoked by Athenian philosophers, medieval churchmen or French jurists, such taxonomy no more accurately described their societies than the convenient shorthand of 'lower', 'middle' or 'upper' class and similar designations in the nineteenth, twentieth or twenty-¢rst centuries. The attempt by some Frenchmen during the Estates-General in 1789 to shoehorn reality into this ancient paradigm ended in spectacular disaster. No matter how much a hierarchical vision appealed to those who would rule, European society was too complex and too dynamic to be constrained by some predetermined mould. This has probably always been true. And in the eighteenth century, it was truer than ever before. 2 The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century 'cabbage noble', gives some idea of the standing of those at the bottom of the heap in the territories of northern Germany and the Baltic lands of Estonia, Livonia and Courland. In Hungary and Poland, as in Spain and Portugal, in Russia and in much of Germany, thousands of families could genuinely call themselves noble, yet their economic circumstances were such as to leave them no better o¡, or even considerably worse o¡, than the local peasantry. Most European nobles were poor. Truly wealthy nobles formed only a tiny minority. In late eighteenthcentury England, 400 or so great landowning families, including the bulk of the 220 peers, enjoyed annual incomes of at least »5000. These were the 'poorest'. Around a dozen enjoyed incomes of between »40,000 and »50,000. Further down, incomes decreased inversely with numbers: around 700 families drew incomes of between »3000 and »4000 yearly, but between 3000 and 4000 lesser gentry made do with merely comfortable incomes of »1000^»3000; perhaps ¢ve times that number of families could still consider themselves gentry on less: those with incomes of between »300 and »700 shaded o¡ into the better-o¡ freeholdersŝ ome 25,000 of them, perhaps? In 1702, 32,000 land tax commissioners were appointed in England. Few, if any, would have been regarded as less than 'gentlemen'. 6 In the unusually prosperous Welsh county of Glamorgan, impoverished descendants of once substantial dynasties, clutching at rentals of »50 a year or so, might insist on styling themselves 'gentlemen', but contemporaries might equally regard them as yeomen, if that. The same individual might be described by both terms. 7 A curious schizophrenia accompanied these di¡erentials. At a theoretical level, most nobles in most countries a¡ected to regard each other as, if not equals, then at least as good as one another. Few went as far as the Poles in openly proclaiming in law the equality of all nobles, but then, that legal equality was a practical ¢ction. Louis XVI of France and Gustavus III of Sweden regarded themselves as 'the ¢rst gentlemen' of 4 The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century
Towards the Ideal Constitution: Rousseau, Montesquieu and 3 May 1791
Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 1995
In this article J. Lukowski has examined how the ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau were used by t... more In this article J. Lukowski has examined how the ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau were used by the framers of the Polish constitution of 1791 to overcome the prevailing Sarmadan ideology of the Polish gentry. This assumed that the traditional institutions were perfect and were geared to block any attempt to change them. The first major breakthrough was to recognise
Towards Partition: Polish Magnates and Russian Intervention in Poland During the Early Reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski*
The Historical Journal, 1985
In a report on the state of Poland in 1766 the papal nuncio, A. E. Visconti, observed that the ne... more In a report on the state of Poland in 1766 the papal nuncio, A. E. Visconti, observed that the new king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, possessed ‘a burning desire to reform the whole country in one day – if only he could – and the entire nation, in order to bring it up to the level of other, more advanced nations’. The interregnum after the death of Augustus III in October 1763 and Poniatowski's election in September 1764 had inaugurated the most determined campaign for reform within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since the Union of Lublin of 1569. By 1763–4 there was little that did not need to be reformed. The accumulation of privilege by the szlachta, the nobility, had attained such dimensions that both the monarchy and the Sejm, the parliament, were almost powerless to govern. The most obvious expression of the impotence of the state and of the refusal of the nobility to submit to the discipline of any centralized authority was, of course, the liberum veto, the use of wh...
Recasting Utopia: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the Polish constitution of 3 May 1791*
The Historical Journal, 1994
ABSTRACTBetween the sixteenth and eighteengh centuries, the nobility of the Polish–Lithuanian com... more ABSTRACTBetween the sixteenth and eighteengh centuries, the nobility of the Polish–Lithuanian commonwealth had developed an ideology of extreme individualism and libertarianism, within a correspondingly weak and decentralized state structure. The first partition of 1772 starkly revealed the weaknesses of the Polish polity, but any hopes of major political overhaul were frustrated by the dead hand of Russian ambassadorial policing. The war of 1787–92 with Turkey proved a temporary distraction for Russia, which the Polish parliament of 1788–92 showed itself only partly capable of exploiting. Factional conflicts and a wary conservatism hampered reforms: the ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau, which closely complemented so many aspects of traditional Polish noble ideology, seemed to offer the most acceptable way forward, culminating in the constitution of 3 May 1791, a compromise between enlightened idealism and political pragmatism.
Recasting Utopia: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the Polish constitution of 3 May 1791*
The Historical Journal, 1994
ABSTRACTBetween the sixteenth and eighteengh centuries, the nobility of the Polish–Lithuanian com... more ABSTRACTBetween the sixteenth and eighteengh centuries, the nobility of the Polish–Lithuanian commonwealth had developed an ideology of extreme individualism and libertarianism, within a correspondingly weak and decentralized state structure. The first partition of 1772 starkly revealed the weaknesses of the Polish polity, but any hopes of major political overhaul were frustrated by the dead hand of Russian ambassadorial policing. The war of 1787–92 with Turkey proved a temporary distraction for Russia, which the Polish parliament of 1788–92 showed itself only partly capable of exploiting. Factional conflicts and a wary conservatism hampered reforms: the ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau, which closely complemented so many aspects of traditional Polish noble ideology, seemed to offer the most acceptable way forward, culminating in the constitution of 3 May 1791, a compromise between enlightened idealism and political pragmatism.
... began to slide into the same sort of fragmentation as Poland. When, at the beginning of the t... more ... began to slide into the same sort of fragmentation as Poland. When, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, bishop Vincent of Krako¬w was chronicling the mythical successes of the ancient Poles against the Roman emperors, he was not simply engaged in a Øight of whimsy ...
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