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

Abstract

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.