A THOUSAND YEARS OF HISTORY 9
constitutional historians. Restricting their arguments to the documents of Polish
legal history, they were able to argue their case more precisely than any of their
rivals. The scheme proposed by Stanislaw Kutrzeba (1876-1946), Bobrzynski's
younger colleague at Cracow, as elaborated in his Historia ustroju Polski w
zarysie (History of Polish Government in Outline, 1905), was one of the more
cogent:
Up to AD 965 The Period of Tribal Organization
965-1200 The Period of Princely Law
1200-1374 The Period of Independent Jurisdictions
1374-1569 The Period of the Estates
1569-1763 The Period of Noble Supremacy
1764-1795 The Period of Reform.^8Methodological debates of this sort were taking place all over Europe at that
time, and show that Polish scholars played their part in the establishment of
History as a coherent academic discipline.
However, the work of the Stanczyk Group - who took their name from that
of the mordant jester of King Sigismund I - also provoked discussions of more
specific relevance to Polish affairs. The Group had come together in the years
following the failure of the January Rising of 1863, and had made its initial
impact by denouncing what appeared to them as the ridiculously romantic pre-
tensions of the insurrectionaries. In particular, they attacked the notion that
Poland's ills were exclusively due to foreign oppression, and urged their col-
leagues to examine the causes of Poland's own internal weakness. As
Bobrzynski himself declared, 'We had no proper government, and that is the one
and only cause of our collapse'. Szuyski attacked the motives of his contempor-
aries more directly. 'History is a surgeon for the fallen warrior', he wrote, 'not
a nurse for the spoiled child'. In this way, the Stanczyks reserved their special
brand of caustic wit for all who sought to romanticize Poland's past for the sake
of modern insurrectionary politics. They compared the irresponsible Golden
Freedom of the eighteenth-century nobility with the frivolous intrigues and self-
righteous rhetoric of contemporary patriots. In their view, the Liberum Veto
(the right of the individual to obstruct the will of the community as a whole), the
Liberum Conspiro (the freedom to conspire against authority), and the Liberum
Defaecatio (the right to vilify one's opponents) were all Polish traits in the same,
unfortunate tradition. They held that the destruction of the old republic had
occurred in the natural course of events, and that all attempts to revive it were
pointless. In this sense, in their critical stance towards Poland's viability as an
independent state, they were dubbed 'Pessimists'. The reaction against them
gained ground in the 1880s, and continued to develop until the First World War.
Under the leadership of Tadeusz Korzon (1839-1918) and Wladystaw
Smolenski (1851-192.6), the Warsaw Positivists subjected the findings of the
Cracovian School to detailed examination, and produced some strikingly dif-
ferent conclusions.^9 Korzon's Dzieje wewnetrzne Polski za Stanislawa-Augusta