The Political discourse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: towards an analysis

ENThe notion of "discourse", in particular in the political context, has been gaining popularity in the social sciences and the humanities, yet at the same time, the inflationary misuse of the term has aroused understandable misgivings. However, a survey of the research done by Anglophone (Cambridge school) and German historians – although the Begriffsgeschichte school does not actually use the term, many of its postulates do cover the same ideas – shows that the issues the term attempts to address are important for gaining an insight into the political language of a given era, as well as the political reality which shapes the discourse, while being shaped by it at the same time. [...] The main source of my analysis is this wide-reaching political literature, from extensive general essays backed with theoretical annotations to short pamphlets written during ongoing debates. Although records of vast numbers of oratory performances have been preserved, I tend to avoid them here, since I believe them to be a source requiring somewhat different research tools; while they may appear uniform, their language deserves to be analysed separately. One thing should be made clear here: the political discourse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was in fact a noble discourse, created by the szlachta for the szlachta. This does not mean that during the two centuries separating the Union of Lublin (1569) and the third partition of Poland-Lithuania (1795) discussions of matters of the state took no notice of the voices of burghers (naturally, peasants had to stay excluded entirely). A handful of authors of theoretical dissertations were of burgher origin, such as Sebastian Petrycy in the sixteenth century; during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a few valuable treatises were written in the cities of Royal Prussia by Christoph Hartknoch, Bartholomäus Keckerman, and Gottfried Lengnich.Finally, during the Great Sejm (1788-1792), burghers joined the national debate concerning reforms of the Commonwealth, namely Józef Pawlikowski and Stanisław Staszic. [Extract, p. 121, 124]