The Tradition of Gentry-Republicanism from the Point of View of the History of Ideas

Abstract

What the analysis undertaken in this paper focuses on, is to redefine the political meaning of the Polish Tradition of Gentry-Republicanism in its broader, European context. The aim of this paper is to point out the paradoxes of presenting the republicanism of the Polish gentry from the perspective of the history of ideas as a kind of traditionalist thought. The main object of criticism is here the widely accepted opposition between the republican (political) and liberal (individualist) idea of freedom, interpreted, respectively, as “conservative” and “modernist”. In this paper it will be argued against the interpretation, which allows to define the republican tradition of the Polish political thought of the 17 th and 18 th century in terms of “traditionalism” as well as to juxtapose it with the liberal tradition of the European political thought initiated among others by Hobbes and defined in terms of democratic “radicalism”. According to the main thesis of this paper, the proper way to solve the paradoxes of interpreting of Polish Gentry-Republicanism as a “conservatism of freedom” is to set that current of the political thought in the European tradition of the “state-radicalism”.