Why Was the Political Discourse of the Polish-Lithuanian Nobility so Weakly Influenced by Natural Law?

Abstract

The concept of natural law exerted an enormous impact on theories of the state and political discourse in Early Modern Europe. However, this idea was hardly present in the political discourse of the nobility in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the mid-eighteenth century. The author addresses the question of why this happened this way. She claims that one of the reasons was the fact that in Poland the language of jurisprudence was not developed, whereas in the Western European discourse of jurisprudence, natural law provided the foundation of any conception of the state. Another cause was that violent religious and power conflicts, which in countries like England, France, or the Netherlands instrumentalised natural law arguments, were practically non-existent in Poland. There, conflicts between the nobility and the monarchs remained within the frame of the ideal of mixed monarchy and republican values. As soon as, in the second half of the eighteenth century, other citizens of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became objects of political theorizing and later discussions in political praxis, natural rights turned up in political discourse concerning now the whole community.