Wolność warunkowana cnotą: moralne podstawy wspólnotowego ładu politycznego w dawnej Rzeczypospolitej

In the sixteenth century the three terms “law”, “liberty” and “respublica” became intertwined in a broader conception of a well-ordered political community, civitas libera, which was seen as the only guarantee of liberty and the public good. For the authors who belong to the tradition of classical republicanism, one of the central questions concerned the nature of the conditions that need to be fulfilled in order to meet the requirements of civil liberty and political obligation. Unlike modern political philosophers who have introduced the language of rights, they understood civil freedom as being one of the benefits derived from living under a well-ordered government – res publica for the attainment of which virtue was of crucial importance. This article focuses on the Polish republican discourse of the sixteenth century that was preoccupied with these questions.