The Concept of Citizenship in the Political Discourse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

• Authors: Marta Kuc-Czerep
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

This article addresses some aspects of the functioning of the concept of ‘citizen’ in the political discourse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the dominant nobility’s discourse, the concept gained a strictly defined meaning: a citizen was, namely, a person entitled to wield or exercise political power in the state. In the estate society realities, it actually boiled down to mutual identification of two concepts: ‘citizen’ and ‘nobleman’. The bourgeois conception of citizenship took shape in confrontation with such understanding of the idea, formulated and propagated by Protestant townsmen – mainly by Wawrzyniec Mitzler de Kolof and Michał Gröll, book traders, printers and publishers from Saxony. They derived the meaning of ‘citizen’ from ‘resident’. In such a concept, the term extended to all the inhabitants of Poland-Lithuania – apart from the nobility, it included, also the townspeople and the peasantry. In this context, of relevance are the changes in the meaning of the German term Bürger (burgher, citizen of the state), which influenced Polish political discourse. This leads to the conclusion that the latter half of the eighteenth century saw the idea of citizenship in its modern meaning.

Keywords

PL

the concept of citizenship; political discourse; eighteenth century; burghers; Warsaw

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Historii im. Tadeusza Manteuffla PAN w Warszawie
• Journal: Acta Poloniae Historica
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 122
• Pages: 51-78

Dates

published

2021-01-19

Contributors

author

Marta Kuc-Czerep

• Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences

• https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0049-834X

Identifiers

DOI

10.12775/APH.2020.122.03