7

The Idea of Nation in the Main Currents of Political Thought of the Polish Enlightenment

Andrzej Walicki

The ideas of nation, national consciousness, national education and so forth belonged to the central themes of the Polish Enlightenment. All intellectual currents of the epoch were correlated with different views on “the national question” end theia developments pan, its a aule, be described as reflecting the transition from th“ old “nation of the gentry,” with its conservative-republican ideology, to a new, more comprehensive notion of nation with a corresponding programme of modern nationbuilding.¹ Hence this topic should entail a reconstruction of the main controversies which belonged to th“ intellectual life of the epoch. I shall concentrate on a brief, selective presentation of a few topics, especially important, in my view, for a proper understanding of the specific contributions of the epoch of Enlightenment to the birth of modern nationhood in Poland. In spite of this emphasis on specificity, I shall also try to show that th“ case of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was after all th“ largest state in th“ East-Central Europe, completely refutes the so-called “Hans Kohn dichotomy,” that is a widely accepted theory claiming that nationalism in Europe was divided from its very beginnings into two diametrically opposed types: Western nationalism and the nationalism of Central and Eastern Europe.² According to this theory, Western nationalism was a product of the Enlightenment, a rationalist ideology, centered around the notions of political legitimacy and active citizenship, while its Eastern counterpart was a romantic collectivism, centered around the irrational, pre-civilized folk-concept. The example of Poland-Lithuania shows however that the concept of nationhood had there a distinctively political content, referring to citizenship, and not ethnicity, and that the major thinkers of the Polish Enlightenment, before the final downfall of the Polish state, developed this notion in a “Western” manner, in accordance with the so-called “French model of the nation.”

Our first topic must be, of course, the relationship between modern nationhood and the legacy of the “democracy of the gentry.” We have been accustomed to thinking of the Polish Enlightenment as a movement of ideas committed to the strengthening of the executive power and therefore strongly opposed to the “republicanism” of the conservative, “Sarmatian” gentry. In fact, however, there was also an “enlightened” version of “Sarmatianism” and its contribution to the general ideological output of the Polish Enlightenment should not be neglected. Michał Wielhorski, the main ideologist of the Confederation of Bar, defended the republican institutions of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by quoting from John Locke.³ His republicanism could not be reduced to the defense of the feudal liberties of the gentry-it was modern and “enlightened” enough to inspire Rousseau to write his Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, a treatise warmly sympathizing with the “gentry republic.” The difference between the “feudal” republicanism of the Polish gentry and the “bourgeois” republicanism of the West was, obviously, not as absolute as the Marxist historians would have us believe, while their essential similarity, namely the common devotion to political freedom, was clearly perceived. Owing to this Polish conservatives rejoiced at the successes of the American Revolution and one of the leaders of the Confederation of Bar, Kazimierz Pułaski, even became an American national hero. Even more paradoxical, though not illogical, was the fact that Hetman Seweryn Rzewuski, one of the most reactionary of Polish magnates, was an enthusiastic admirer not only of Franklin and Washington but also of the French revolution. He rejoiced at the seizure of the Bastille and wanted the French to show the world that free nations could dispense with kings.⁴

For the gentry republicans “nation” was a political and legal concept, deprived of linguistic or ethic connotations: it was conceived as a body politic, embracing all active citizens, i.e. all members of the gentry, irrespective of their native language or ethnic background. In other words, it was perfecdy possible to be “genre Ruthenus, natione Polonus.” But this indifference towards ethnicity should not be presented as anticipating the modern notion of “multi-culturalism.” The gentry republicans of the old Commonwealth described themselves as “Sarmatians” and the term “Sarmatianism” referred, as is known, to a distinctive culture common to all of them, remarkably homogeneous and deliberately created as a unifying bond. The nation of the gentry was still multi-lingual but not multicultural; it took great care to cultivate and develop its cultural unity, which finally led also to linguistic polonization of its non-Polish members.

The central element in the republican view of the nation was the idea of popular sovereignty. They defined the nation as the collective subject of the sovereign political will, that is as the opposite of a population subject to a monarch. From this point of view “nation” and absolute monarchy were, of aoursa, mutuaiiy axelusive, while participatory republic was the only form of mature nationhood; even England did not deserve to be called a nation because its political freedom was too limited.⁵ Many theorists of gentry republicanism concluded from this that Poland-Lithuania was the only true nation in Europe. Interestingly, the most enlightened among them, for instance Michał Wielhorski (already mentioned), or the castellan of Vitebsk, Adam Rzewuski, did not try to defend the view that nation should be restricted to one estate only; on the contrary, they insisted that this was a transient phenomenon, caused by special historical circumstances, and declared their willingness to see the rights of active citizenship made universal, related to the entire population of the country. Adam Rzewuski wrote: “O, how ardently I want that no privileged class would exist and that burghers and peasants become simply humans and Poles.”⁶

The sincerity of these words should not be questioned. They harmonized with the inner logic of the idea of popular sovereignty, so dear to Rzewuski. This idea made him, as well as Wielhorski and many other gentry republicans, an ardent admirer and disciple of Rousseau. To be a “gentry republican” in eighteenth-century Poland did not necessarily entail being socially conservative. Adam Rzewuski was not alone in criticizing the Constitution of 3 May not only for the introduction of hereditary monarchy but also for inadequately improving the situation of the peasantry.⁷ This inner logic of the republican conception of the nation explains the possibility of an easy transition from the “old republicanism” of the Sarmatian gentry to the “new republicanism,” free from the retrospective ideals of “Sarmatian” ideology and unequivocally committed to progressive ideas of the radical Enlightenment. A good illustration of this is Wojciech Turski who began his political career in the ranks of the “old-republican” opponents of progressive reforms but soon became a radical Jacobin, or an “enlightened republican,”⁸ and an advocate of a revolutionary alliance between Jacobin France and Poland, as two bastions of republican freedom.⁹

Another consequence of the republican conception of the nation was the deep conviction that members of the nation had an inalienable right to both internal and external sovereignty. Hence the adherents of the republican conception, although defining the nation in purely political terms, could see themselves as a nation even after the final disappearance of their state. Subjects of one monarchy can become loyal subjects of another, but sovereignty embodied in the nation, not in the monarch, involves a legitimate right to self-mastery which is with us “as long as we live” (to quote from the Polish national anthem).¹⁰ Owing to this, the partitions of Poland transformed the conservative republicanism of the gentry into a revolutionary force, setting against the legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance a new principle of political legitimacy: the principle of national self-determination.¹¹ This was not yet the modern principle of national self-determination, based upon a linguistic, monoethnic conception of nation. But precisely because of this it was more in tune with the prevailing political views of the epoch and more convincing in its logic, especially in its invocation of historical rights, even for the monarchs themselves.

The second question which I want to raise is the specificity of the idea of national sovereignty as developed by the thinkers of the Polish Enlightenment. To put it briefly, in Poland the idea of external national sovereignty had its main source in the conception of the internal sovereignty of the nation of the gentry in its relation to the king, while in the West the concept of sovereignty was developed by the theorists of absolutism (Jean Bodin), as a concept pertaining to the state making it the highest legal authority, the highest arbiter in human affairs. Hence in the Western political tradition the conception of sovereignty sanctioned the practice of power politics in the name of raison d’état while in Poland it was invoked, as a rule, to defend the legitimate rights of nations, even stateless ones, and to limit the excessive ambitions of the states by subordinating them to the principles of a supranational law of nations. Because of this the Polish Enlightenment gave birth to a rich theoretical literature dealing with these problems. A physiocrat, Hieronim Stroynowski, put forward a theory that every nation had four natural rights: (1) the right to free and independent existence, (2) the right to defend itself by force, (3) the right to the certainty that international agreement would not be violated and, finally, (4) the right to demand help from other nations.¹² Similar ideas were developed by many other Polish jurists and political thinkers of the age.¹³ It should be stressed that the right to self-determination was never restricted, explicitly or implicitly, to European peoples: Polish public opinion did not sympathize with colonialism and took the side of the distant colonized peoples.¹⁴

The tendency to see international legal order as a safeguard of national sovereignty, and not something incompatible with it, proved to be very durable in Poland. After the partitions Stanisław Staszic came to the conclusion that the only means of introducing the rule of law into international relations was to organize a universal Association of Nations.¹⁵ Hugo Kołłątaj, who became an admirer of Napoleon, dreamt of securing the rights of nations in a restored “Western Empire” while young Adam Czartoryski, as the Russian minister of foreign affairs, wrote in 1803 an extensive memorandum about the need to foster the creation of a “Society of States” which would put an end to the state of nature in relations between nations.¹⁶ In later years similar ideas were taken up and developed, in the language of speculative philosophy or religious messianism, by the leading thinkers of Polish Romanticism, including Adam Mickiewicz and the greatest Polish philosopher of the romantic epoch, August Cieszkowski.¹⁷ The transition between the Enlightenment idea of the “society of nations” and the Romantic vision of the regenerated humankind is exemplified by Czartoryski’s Essai sur la diplomatie (Paris-Marseille, 1830). This splendid work was inspired by the Enlightenment views on the law of nations but, at the same time, abandoned the Enlightenment concept of the nationstate, setting against it the Romantic concept of the nation as a “divine creation,” contrasted with the state as an artificial, human creation. The reasons for this remarkable continuity of thought were complicated and numerous, but one of them was undoubtedly that in the Polish political tradition, shaped by the best features of the democracy of the gentry, sovereignty was seen as an attribute of the nation rather then of the state; that it had always been conceived as decentralized sovereignty and, therefore, did not imply an undivided monopoly on power. Another feature of this tradition—the somewhat archaic inability to distinguish clearly between politics and morality, combined with the awareness of one’s own weakness, was, of course, a powerful stimulus for seeking national salvation by limiting the sovereignty of the states for the sake of international justice.

Let us proceed now to a few remarks on the two greatest thinkers of the “Party of Reform:” Hugo Kołłątaj, the main architect of the Constitution of 3 May, and Stanisław Staszic. I shall concentrate mainly on their different attitudes towards the legacy of the gentry democracy and their different proposals for the future. Kołłątaj’s views on passing from the “nation of the gentry” to the “new nation” can be summarized in three points.

First, he remained faithful to the republican view that sovereignty should belong not to the king but to the nation. He stressed that the reformed Poland would not become a monarchy, in spite of the introduction of the principle of heredity. The Polish king would become head of a Commonwealth, and not a monarch.¹⁸ The “golden freedom” of the gentry was to be limited, but the republican ethos of active citizenship, active participation in political life, was to be strengthened. To achieve this aim, the Parliament was to be made a permanently active ruling body, holding both the legislative and the executive power.

Second, the “nation of the gentry” was to become a “nation of proprietors”, that is, active citizenship was to become dependent on property qualifications. The landless gentry were seen by Kołłątaj as clients of big magnates and, therefore, representing not their own will but the will of their patrons.¹⁹ Following the French physiocratic ideas, Kołłątaj wanted to entrust the fates of the nation to the owners of land since the landed property was in his eyes a guarantee of having a stake in one’s country and, therefore, a precondition of rational, enlightened patriotism. The Great Diet implemented these ideas by giving political rights to the landowning burghers while depriving the landless gentry of their right to vote.

Third, the peoples of a nation should become homogeneous, speaking the samt language and living under the same laws.²⁰ This view was a conscious attempt to apply to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the so-called Jacobin conception of the nation, keenly suspicious of regional and cultural differences as incompatible with national unity and social modernization.²¹ In the Polish conditions it meant the unification of laws, the recognition of the Polish language as a unifying force for all the provinces of the state, as the language of the court, government offices, and schools, with the exception of religious matters, which were to be taught in the language of the rite.²² The rights of religious minorities were to be respected but only in strictly religious matters. Thus, for instance, Jews were to be deprived of their autonomy, subject to Polish jurisdiction, forced to attend Polish schools and dress like other Poles.²³

It should be stressed that these ideas had nothing in common with the so-called “cultural nationalism,” characteristic, according to Hans Kohn, of Germany and East-Central Europe. Kołłątaj was concerned with the political unity of the nation and showed no interest in the irrational social ties, including the mystique of national culture. His conception of nation was political, rationalist, consciously modeled on revolutionary France.

The other leading theorist, Stanisław Staszic, was a burgher and propagated another variant of the “French model of nation”-a variant stressing the positive historical role of royal absolutism and extremely critical of the entire “republican” tradition of the gentry. The decisive element in his conception of nation was not internal sovereignty, i.e. political freedom, but the abolition of feudal estates, i.e. social integration based upon equality before the law. As to sovereignty, he repeatedly emphasized the priority of external politics, that is, the necessity of putting the interests of the state in relations to its neighbors above the civic and political freedom of the citizens: a country surrounded by absolute monarchies, he argued, cannot afford to allow its citizens to exercise internal freedom at the cost of external security.²⁴ In his Przestrogi dla Polski, 1790 (Warnings for Poland) he pretended to have changed his monarchical leanings and presented himself as a believer in direct transition from feudal anarchy to an “orderly republic”; this, however, was merely a tactical move, expressing his awareness of the fact that an open attack on the Polish republican tradition would immediately alienate the overwhelming majority of the Great Diet. In fact he treated “the gentry democracy” as a truly disastrous form of government. Even the word “freedom” was suspicious to him as too often concealing the interests of the privileged classes.²⁵

Like Kołłątaj, Staszic supported the conception of the “nation of proprietors,” i.e. of depriving non-proprietors of political influence. But he rejected the privileged treatment of the landed property and demanded for the burghers one half of all seats in the Diet. Staszic agreed with Rousseau, that education should shape the souls of the citizen in a national pattern and clearly paraphrasing Rousseau he wrote: “on opening its eyes for the first time, a child should see nothing beyond the fatherland, for which alone it will one day have the duty of closing them.”²⁶ Although he sometimes used the word “nation” in its purely political sense, as a body of citizens, he was more and more inclined to give it another meaning: to define it in ethnic, cultural and linguistic terms, as a community of people formed by a common history but once created, capable of existing even without a state of its own. He also made a distinction between “inborn” and “acquired” nationality, the first comprising blood-ties, language and some specific features of national culture, the second finding expression in forms of government, laws and civilization. While the “inborn” nationality should be preserved intact, the “acquired” one should keep pace with universal progress.²⁷

After the partitions Staszic finally abandoned the republican view of nation as a body of free citizens and made a long step towards the ethnolinguistic conception of nation. This new, “tribal” conception of nation turned his attention to the Slavic traits, common to Poles and Russians and thus provided him with arguments for a Panslavic program.²⁸

The gradual replacement of the political definition of nation by the ethnic-cultural conception was certainly one of the most important shifts in the Polish political thought of the late Enlightenment. It was fostered mainly by two phenomena: the growing radicalism of certain progressive writers and the downfall of the Polish state. Franciszek Jezierski, representing the radical wing of the group calling itself “Kołłątaj’s Forge,” pointed out that there could be nations deprived of statehood (Italy), or of national unity (Germany), but held together by common culture; he did so with the intention of distinguishing between the nation and its ruling class, including the “proprietors,” and stressing the nation-building role of the “common folk,” as creators of both the national idiom and the distinctively national customs.²⁹ After the final partition these ideas became popular among patriots of all political persuasions, including the outspoken conservatives. “The nation is constituted by its language,”³⁰ said Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, and the ex-jacobin, Samuel Bogumił Linde, started to work on his monumental Dictionary of the Polish language. Both of them, as well as Kołłątaj and Staszic, belonged to the newly created Warsaw Society of the Friends of Learning, whose declared aim was to study national language, culture and history in order to help their compatriots to exist as a stateless nation. Of course, to define the Polish nation in ethnic-cultural terms was by then not an easy task. The domination of the Polish culture in the vast territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in the Ukraine, as well as the underdevelopment of the Ukrainian and Belorussian as literary languages, created a widespread illusion that Poland-Lithuania could, in principle, be transformed into a linguistically and culturally homogeneous nation in the same way in which it was being done in revolutionary France. It would be quite anachronistic to explain this view in terms of some kind of Polish “imperialism.” It was rather a logical consequence of the fact that the Enlightenment conception of the Polish nation defined nationality in terms of citizenship and political loyalty, not in terms of ethnolinguistic differentiation. Like the French Jacobins, Polish patriots of the Enlightenment period (with few exceptions, mentioned above) considered ethnic differences to be immaterial in defining nationality. For them, the peasantry of the Commonwealth was one whole mass which still had to be aroused to Polish national consciousness through the abolition of serfdom, grants of property rights, and general civil enfranchisement. They could see that this would be more difficult in the case of the Orthodox Ukrainian peasantry then in that of the ethnically Polish peasantry, or, for example, the Catholic peasantry of Lithuania. But they did not believe that it was impossible: they thought it was only necessary to develop Polish education in the ethnically non-Polish territories and to introduce true equality of Roman Catholics, Uniates and the Orthodox before the law. From their viewpoint it was the duty of Polish patriots to carry out this task-their duty not only to themselves, but also, and indeed above all, to all potential Poles, even if as yet they spoke a language other than Polish.

It should be stressed that this viewpoint was shared by Tadeusz Kościuszko who was more radical in social matters, and more tolerant of ethnic differences, than Hugo Kołłątaj. Kościuszko used the words “Pole” and “Polish” in two senses: a narrower sense, referring to people who spoke Polish and practiced the Roman Catholic faith, and a broader sense which embraced all “fellow countrymen,” thus including the Uniates who spoke Ukrainian or Belorussian, and even the Orthodox clergy who came under the authority of the Russian Metropolitan in Kiev. In the first sense, the adjective “Polish” corresponded significantly with the word “English,” while in the second sense, it covered all the inhabitants of the Commonwealth and was thus the equivalent of the word “British.” Kościuszko was aware of Moscow’s successes in exploiting the anti-Polish resentments of the Orthodox population of the Commonwealth and reacted to this by stressing that the Polish Orthodox Ruthenians had the same fatherland as the ethnic Poles and deserved to be included in the Polish nation on equal terms with Catholics. But, on the other hand, he shared the “Jacobin” belief that the development of a Polish education system in the eastern territories would lead to the linguistic polonization of the Orthodox population, putting an end to their separatist tendencies and thus paving the way for a politically unified, although religiously differentiated, Polish nation.

No doubt, these views were hardly compatible with the idea of a multicultural national community, which would encourage manifestations of ethnic diversity and renounce all efforts to achieve cultural homogeneity. But whatever we think about it, we must realize that the ideologists of the Polish Enlightenment could not afford to ignore the centralizing tendency of European progress. The unifying tendency was inherent in the very nature of nationalism as an undermining ideology. Ernest Gellner in his Nations and Nationalism defines nationalism as a species of patriotism which favors cultural homogeneity.³¹ Polish nationalism of the Age of Enlightenment, exactly like its French .counterpart, provides an important corroboration of this thesis. We can say, using Gellner’s words, that it was “based on a culture striving to be a high (literate) culture” and that this was the reason why it could not recognize separate national identities of the Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian peasants. The later exuberance of romantic idealizations of the cultural diversity of the old Sarmatian Commonwealth should not obscure this important fact.

The Enlightenment concept of the Polish nation indicates that in the eighteenth century the process of forming a modern Polish nation was taking place in Poland along the lines similar to those followed in the countries of Western Europe. The course of this process changed under the pressure of external circumstances: the partitions of Poland. From the moment when Poland was placed under the yoke of foreign powers, the identification of citizenship and nationality ceased to be possible, for it would have meant that Poles were to turn into Germans or Russians. This was unthinkable for a nation with a high level of national consciousness and it thus became necessary to abandon the political concept of the nation. This, however, entailed consequences which the Poles had not foreseen, and which for a long period they did not wish to accept, for it accelerated and in its own way validated the process of “ethnic awakening” of the stateless nations, including the non-Polish population of the former Commonwealth. In this way Polish nationalist aspirations came to be an important factor in the general “national awakening” in East-Central Europe. This, in turn, had to come into conflict with the historic claims of the Polish patriots.

Thus, Lord Acton seems to have been right in stressing that the partitions of Poland undermined the hitherto existing system of political legitimacy and paved the way for “the theory of nationality” as an entirely new legitimizing device, with all its consequences for “the ancient European system.”³² It seems perfectly arguable that if pre-partition Poland had survived within the existing, or slightly reduced, state boundaries, and if the Enlightenment reforms, which also covered the integration of Lithuania and the linguistic homogenization of the state on the French model, had been crowned with success, the whole process of favoring modern nationalities in the area of Central and Eastern Europe would have proceeded differently.³³ The Constitution of 3 May, together with the entire legislative work of the Great Diet, is often seen as the best summary of the progressive legacy of the Polish Enlightenment. However, for the sake of historical accuracy, it is necessary to qualify this widespread opinion. We must be aware of some specific features of the Constitution. First of all, it must be stressed that the Constitution did not reflect the radical tendency in the Enlightenment reform program. On the contrary, it was a product of an uneasy compromise between two moderate wings of the reform movement: the westernizing constitutional monarchists and the “enlightened Sarmatians” whose ideology remained linked to the republican values of the socially conservative and ardently Catholic Bar Confederation. Its main concession to the first group was its espousal of hereditary monarchy, a system foreign to the native tradition of the democracy of the gentry. Its concessions to the second group included the solemn endorsement of all the privileges of the noble estate (with the exclusion of the landless gentry) and, also, endowing the Roman Catholic faith with the status of “the dominant national religion.” This was a tribute to the conservatives and a far cry from the standpoint of the most progressive thinkers of the Polish Enlightenment. The views of the latter were adequately expressed in the following words of Tadeusz Kościuszko: “The nation should be the lord and master of its own fate, and its rights should therefore be superior to those of the church; no religion could contravene them by appealing to divine law, but on the contrary, every religion should be obedient to the laws established by a given nation.”³⁴

The overall, moderately modernizing spirit of the Great Diet found expression, above all, in an idea which reflected an important phase in the evolution of nation-building ideologies in Poland but was not allowed, nonetheless, to take strong roots in the Polish soil: the idea of a “nation of property-owners.” The architects of the Constitution saw it as a means of saving the status of the landed nobility while, at the same time, not exposing the government, which they willed to be strong, to the anarchic leanings of the landless gentry. It is obvious, however, that the inner logic of the Enlightenment concept of the nation, in conjunction with the republican principle of the sovereignty of the people, had to lead the most progressive thinkers of the Polish Enlightenment to a different conception, radically opposed to both the estate-exclusiveness of the “noble nation” and the property-qualifications, as envisaged by the Great Diet. This was, of course, the conception of the “nation of the people,” set forth by F.S. Jezierski (who stressed the role of the “commonality in the national community”) and embraced by other Polish “Jacobins” from the “Kołłątaj’s Forge.” It is important to remember that this conception was loudly proclaimed by Tadeusz Kościuszko who categorically refused to fight for the privileged alone, and whose idea of the Polish nation embraced all inhabitants of the Commonwealth, irrespective of their estate, property, religion, or ethnic origin. Thus, it is fair to say that the last will of independent Poland is to be found in the proclamations of Kościuszko’s uprising, and not in the legislative acts of the Great Diet.

Notes

1. For a more detailed study of these problems see my book The Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Nationhood. Polish Politick Thought from Noble Republicanism to Tadeusz Kościuszko. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).

2. For a systematization of Kohn’s ideas see Louis L. Snyder, The Meaning of Nationalism. Foreword by Hans Kohn. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1954). Cf. also Aira Kemilainen, Nationalism: Problems Concerning the Word. The Concept and Classification (Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän Kasvatusopillinen Korkeakoulu, 1964).

3. See Michał Wielhorski, Oprzywróceniu dawnego rządu według pierwiastkowych Rzeczypospolitej ustaw (On the restoration of the ancient government in accordance with the fundamental laws of the Republic) (n.p., 1775).

4. Seweryn Rzewuski, Osukcesy tronu w Polszcze rzecz krótka (A short essay on succession to the throne in Poland) (Warszawa, 1789), pp. 25, 45. On the Polish perception of American revolution see Zofia Libiszowska, Opinia polska wobec rewolucji amerykańskiej w XVIII wieku (The Polish opinion of the American Revolution in the 18th century) (Lodz-Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1962).

5. Adam Wawrzyniec Rzewuski, O formierzzdu republikańskiego myŚli (Thoughts on the republican form of government) (Warszawa, 1790), pp. 73-4.

6. Rzewuski, O formée rządu, p. 168.

7. In a private letter written one month after the passing of the Constitution he wrote: “I find the rights of the peasants included in the new constitution insufficiently clear and an inadequate assurance of the freedom and property of the poor yokel against the proud covetousness which will bring his undoing.” Quoted in Adam Próchnik, Demokracja Kościuszkowska (Kościuszko democracy) (Warszawa: “Wiedza,” 1946), p. 37.

8. This was his own term. See Wojciech Turski, Myslio królach, o sukcesyi, oprzeszłym iprzyszłym rządzie (Reflections on kings, on succession, on the past and future government) (Warszawa, 1790), p. 10.

9. See Próchnik, Demokacja, p. 66.

10. This has been stressed by Janusz Maciejewski in his “Pojęcie narodu w mysł i republikantów 1767-1775,” (The concept of nation in the thought of republicans, 1767-1775) in Janusz Gockowski and Andrzej Walicki, eds., Idee i koncepcje narodu w polskiej mysł i politycznej czasów porozbiorowych (Warszawa: PWN, 1977), p. 34.

11. Cf. Janusz Tazbir, Kultura szlachecka w Polsce (Gentry culture in Poland) (Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna, 1978), pp. 71-2.

12. Hieronim Stroynowski, Nauka prawa przyrodzonego, politycznego, ekonomiki politycznej iprawa naroddw (The study of natural and political law, political economy, and the law of nations) (Wilno, 1785), part 4, paragraph 5.

13. Cf. Stanisław Hubert, Pogląd na prawo narodów w Polsce czasdw Oświecenia (View on the law of nations in Poland during the Enlightenment) (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1960).

14. Cf. Janusz Tazbir, Rzeczpospolita szlachecka wobec wielkich odkryc (The gentry republic in relation to the great discoveries) (Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna, 1973), p. 203.

15. See the last canto of his historiosophical poem Rod ludzki (The Human race). Cf. Walicki, The Enlightenment, pp. 61-2.

16. See Józef Ujejski, Dzieje polskiego mesjanizmu do powstania listopadowego włącznie (The history of Polish messianism up to and including the November Uprising) (Lwów: Ossolineum, 1931), and Jerzy Skowronek, Antynapoleońskie koncepcje Czartoryskiego (Czartoryski’s anti-Napoleon concepts) (Warszawa: PWN, 1969), pp. 48-53.

17. For a detailed presentation of their ideas see Andrzej Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

18. Hugo Kołłątaj, Listy Anonima i Prawo polityczne narodu polskiego (.Anonymous letters and Political law of the Polish nation). Ed. Bogusław Leśnodorski and Helena Wereszycka (Warszawa: PWN, 1954), vol. 2, pp. 47-8.

19. Kołłątaj, Listy Anonima., vol. 1, pp. 292-6.

20. Kołłątaj, Listy Anonima., vol 1, pp. 367-70.

21. The French Jacobins conducted their great Gallicization campaign under the banner of the struggle against counterrevolution. The deputy Barère put it as follows: “Federalism and superstition speak Breton; émigrés and hatred for the republic speak German; the counterrevolution speaks Italian; favoritism speaks Basque. Let us destroy these dangerous tools of error.” (Quoted from Hans Kohn, Prelude to Nation States: The French and German Experience. 1789-1818 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 91.

22. Kołłątaj, Listy Anonima, vol. 1, p. 370, and vol. 2, p. 246.

23. Kołłątaj, Listy Anonima, vol. 2, p. 329.

24. See Stanisław Staszic, Pisma filozoficzne i spoleczne (Philosophical and social works), ed. Bogdan Suchodolski (Warszawa: PWN, 1954), vol. 1, p. 165.

25. Cf. Stanisław Staszic, Rddludzki. Wersja brulionowa. (The human race: Draft version) ed. Zbigniew Daszkowski (Warszawa: PWN, 1959), vol. 3, pp. 270-1.

26. “The newly born infant,” wrote Rousseau, “upon first opening his eyes, must gaze upon the fatherland, and until his dying should behold nothing else.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland. Trans. Willmore Kendall (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), p. 19. Cf Staszic, Pisma, vol. 1, p. 20.

27. Staszic, Pisma, vol. 2, pp. 276-8.

28. See his Mys’li o równowadze politycznej w Europie (Reflections on the Political Balance in Europe). Pisma, vol. 2, pp. 301-321.

29. Cf. Franciszek Salezy Jezierski, Wybór pism (Selected works) ed. Zdzisław Skwarczyński (Warszawa: PWN, 1952), pp. 217-8 and 244.

30. Quoted from Andrzej Feliks Grabski, Mys’lhistoryczna polskiego Oswiecenia (Historical thought of the Polish Enlightenment) (Warszawa: PWN, 1976), p. 391.

31. See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 138.

32. See his essay “Nationality,” in John Emerich Edward Dalbert-Acton, History of Freedom and Other Essays (Freeport, N.Y., 1907), p. 276.

33. Cf. Roman Szporluk, “Poland and the Rise of the Theory and Practice of Modern Nationality,” Dialectics and Humanism, Warszawa 2 (1990): 43-64.

34. Tadeusz Kościuszko, “Memorial do A. J. Czartoryskiego” (Address to A. J. Czartoryski), Kwartalnik Historycmy 4 (1965): 899.