Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 4 - Mixed Constitution and the Institutional Foundations of the Commonwealth

  • Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves, Jagiellonian University, Krakow
  • Translated by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa
  • Book:
    Polish Republican Discourse in the Sixteenth Century
    Published online:
    02 April 2020
    Print publication:
    09 April 2020, pp 175-238

  • Summary

    Chapter 4 focuses on the institutional foundations of a republican order, including the mixed form of government (forma mixta). All Polish republican authors argued in favour of the mixed polity, although they disagreed as to which of the elements of the mixed constitution should be strengthened or how the balance between them should be achieved. A close examination of these issues demonstrates that it is possible to talk about several republican projects at the time, as well as in later epochs, but there is no doubt that in Polish sixteenth-century republican visions of politics only a mixed res publica of a monarchical character was seen as the best guarantee of its normative foundations. In the republican discourse, the institutional order of the commonwealth served the same goal as the normative categories, which was the attainment and the preservation of a free and well-ordered polity. The category of a republic in its original Ciceronian form referred to the political order of a civitas libera, a free political community governed by laws and not by men.