Polish Republican Discourse in the Sixteenth Century

Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Her major publications focus on normative political theory and include The Idea of a Civil Society: Contemporary Debate and its Sources (2004, 2012), Questions of Contemporary Political Philosophy (2007), An Identity of the Old Continent and the Future of the European Project (2007) and Civil Society, Democracy and Democratization (2016).

• Introduction: classical republican tradition and the Polish republican discourse; 1. Polish sixteenth-century political thought in context; 1.1 The fifteenth-century origins of Polish humanism and political thought; 1.2 The political and constitutional background; 1.3 Specific features of sixteenth-century Polish political thought; 2. The commonwealth (res publica): a free political community; 2.1 The commonwealth (res publica) and the concept of political order; 2.2 Justice and law; 2.3 The paradigm of liberty; 3. Virtue and the common good; 3.1 Moral foundations of good order; 3.2 Virtue and the public good; 3.3 Citizenship and duties to the commonwealth; 3.4 Manners, education, emendation; 4. Mixed constitution and the institutional foundations of the commonwealth; 4.1 Introduction; 4.2 The sources of power and the principle of supreme authority; 4.3 The mixed form of government and the monarchia mixta; 4.4 The king, senators, and parliamentary envoys; 4.5 Free election; Epilogue.

'Polish Republican Discourse in the Sixteenth Century will be read with interest by students and scholars of Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as historians of early modern political theory.' Tomasz Grusiecki, Comptes Rendus