10ANARCHIA:
The Noble Democracy
Throughout the modern period, the history of most European countries is dom-
inated by the growth of the state. The emergence of national states in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the trends to Absolutism in the seventeenth
and to Enlightened Despotism in the eighteenth century; and the drive to
harness state power to economic, social, and educational programmes in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have proceeded with no great regard to
expressions of resistance or dissent. Certainly until the First World War, the
arguments were mainly concerned with the directions, methods, and priorities
of developing state power, and only on rare occasions with fundamental prob-
lems as to the desirability or necessity of state power itself. Only after two world
wars of unprecedented destructiveness, and the experience of Fascist and com-
munist regimes which have devoured millions of human victims, have the
excesses of the state inspired any general discomfort at the political achieve-
ments of half a millennium.
In this context, the workings of one of the very few states in which strong tra-
ditions consistently opposed the pretensions of central government may prove
instructive. In the Republic of Poland—Lithuania as constituted between the
union of 1569 and the Third Partition of 1795, political anarchism provided one
of the guiding ideals of its noble democracy. Its watchword — 'Nierzadem
Polska Stoi' ('It is by unrule that Poland stands') - contains a paradox which
Proudhon himself would have admired, and comes close to Bellegarrigue's
famous slogan of 1848, 'L'Anarchie, c'est l'ordre'. Its laws and practices were
inspired by deeply rooted beliefs in individual freedom and civil liberty which,
for the period, were exceptional. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they
seem to have exercised some distant influence on the radical movements of
Western Europe, not least through writings of the Polish Brethren. But in the
eighteenth century they were completely unfashionable, and widely misunder-
stood. During the Enlightenment,' Anarchic' was used as a term of abuse, a syn-
onym for chaos and terror; and in the nineteenth century, the former Republic
continued to be the object of retrospective derision. To the Prussian and Russian
historians who interpreted its downfall as part of their own rise to fame, it
exhibited a degenerate form of government which had been rightly supplanted
by the progressive and benevolent rule of their own monarchs. Their opinions