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"De Republica" four-volume edition

De Republica is the twelfth and largest publication in the Old Polish Political Thought Library series, edited by the Alexis de Tocqueville Center for Political and Legal Thought together with the Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro Foundation for the Support of Research on Old Polish Political and Legal Thought, published by The Publishing House of VIZJA University.

Krzysztof Hartknoch is one of the most prominent historians of Polish law and the political system of the late 17th century. The published work contains a detailed description of the political system of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, prepared by an author from Ducal Prussia, who was a professor and co-rector of the Gimnasium Academicum in Toruń, an excellent school best known for the fact that it was there that Nicolaus Copernicus announced his most famous astronomical thesis. Hartknoch, a supporter of the Polish republican system and a patriot of both Prussia and Poland, draws on extensive normative material to provide an extremely thorough discussion of the legal and political institutions of the Commonwealth and highlights the richness of its cultural, political, and legal achievements. He places this discussion in the context of the historical evolution of Poland and the territories and lands associated with it. In doing so, he argues with both German authors who are unfavorable to Poland (Hermann Conring) and with the mythologizing tendencies of the most important Polish chroniclers (f.i Wincenty Kadłubek). This work, which has unfortunately been often overlooked until now, allows the reader to form a multifaceted picture of the politics and political system of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th century. The excellent translation of the work from the original Latin by Ms. Jagoda Marszałek and Mr. Marek Marszałek, with an erudite introduction by Dr. hab. Maciej Chmieliński, professor at the University of Łódź and with the work on Courland and Semigallia translated by Dr. Anna Maciejewska, fills a painful gap in 17th-century Polish historiography on political systems. This edition of De Republica contains the collated text of the treatise from the editio ultima of 1687 (entitled De Republica Polonica) and the editio princeps of 1678, then entitled Respublica Polonica.

The publication was prepared in cooperation with VIZJA University, which is implementing the project devoted to the Polish jurisprudence of the 16th-18th centuries, co-financed the state budget under the program of the by Ministry of Science and Higher Education called the National Programme for the Development of Humanities.

The preparation of the translation, collation, and critical edition was made possible through the support of our Sponsor, PZU. We would like to express our gratitude for five years of fruitful cooperation, which has enabled the publication of eight of the twelve volumes in the Series.

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