282 ANARCHIA
The political game as played in Poland-Lithuania was of a very special type.
The absence of chains of command radiating from the centre, or of a social hier-
archy organized in the interests of the state, permitted individual, local, or
provincial policies to be pursued without fear of restraint from above.
Everything depended on the shifting patterns of patronage, rank, wealth, merit,
and fortune; virtually nothing on raison d'etat. The state never pretended to an
interest of its own which was greater than the sum of interests of its individual
citizens. As a result, the external policy of the Republic was strikingly passive;
whilst internal policies were eternally inconclusive. In one interesting hypothe-
sis, political life was compounded from the kaleidoscopic interplay of small-
scale, local interests and of larger, more impermanent, regional interests: or, as
it was put, of 'small neighbourhoods' and of 'large neighbourhoods'.^32 It would
take a Lewis Namier - whose work on the underlying relationships of politics in
Georgian England has a strong scent of his Polish origins—to test the exactness
of this analysis. But it would be well worth testing, and would make an excel-
lent subject for research.
In fact, the closest parallels to Poland's 'Noble Democracy' can probably be
found outside Europe altogether, in America. At first sight at least, the outlook
of the Polish nobility would seem to agree with that of the gentry of the English
colonies of the deep South, whose vast plantations and brilliant social life were
perpetuated, as in Poland-Lithuania, by their isolation from central government
and by the servitude of the rural masses. Slave-owning democrats such as
Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, and other founding fathers of the
USA, have much in common with the reforming wing of magnatial politicians
among their contemporaries in Poland—Lithuania. Further north, in New
England, a different brand of individualism was encouraged by religious beliefs,
and by the colonists' rejection of the spiritual coercion practised by ecclesiasti-
cal authorities in most European countries. The thoughts of Henry Thoreau
beside the Walden Pond, or in his 'Essay on the Duty of Civil Disobedience'
would have found a greater measure of understanding in the Polish Sejm than in
any Court or Parliament in Europe. His famous motto to the effect that 'that
government is best that governs least', would have brought a roar of acclaim at
any provincial dietine, and encapsulates the opposition of the Polish nobility to
the growth of royal power throughout the Republic's existence. Primitive
American anarchism, born on the Frontier of a new continent, may well have
had a kindred spirit, if not a direct ancestor, in the ideals of that extinct Republic
which once roamed the plains of Eastern Europe.
Oddly enough, the ideals of the Polish nobility possess an air of striking
modernity. In an age when most Europeans were lauding the benefits of
Monarchism, Absolutism, or of state power, the noble citizens of
Poland—Lithuania were praising their 'Golden Freedom', the right of resistance,
the social contract, the liberty of the individual, the principle of government by
consent, the value of self-reliance. These concepts feature widely in the ideolo-
gies of modern, liberal democracies. It is inconceivable, of course, that they were