Why do countries fall? The question is a deep and meaningful one that hides in its philosophy aspects of historical, sociological, and moral discourse. In the case of the decline and fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1579–1795), the traditional (often called the Kraków School) analysis singles out the spiraling political perversions of a governmental superstructure dominated by a vast heterogeneous — yet unified in the sociohistorical self-image it created for itself — oligarchy of nobles, called szlachta, who over the course of several centuries, through greed, arrogance, and extreme civic shortsightedness, monopolized for itself most if not all political power within the realm, making the centripetal mechanisms of the monarchy unworkable and untenable, thus leading to national decline, foreign intervention, and the dissolution of the polity. It is inevitable, therefore, that the szlachta’s modern-day historian-critics would seek out their enemies on the moralistic battleground, using morally imbued terms, such as Piotr Wandycz’s description of the liberum veto as a “sinister symbol,” where the arrogant and self-serving szlachta went against the established common good of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The fall of res publica is thus the moral failure and fall of its leading enfranchised class.

It is this vocabulary of morality that is analyzed by Benedict Wagner-Rundell’s Common Wealth, Common Good: The Politics of Virtue in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania, a fine new addition to the growing anglophone scholarship on the history of the commonwealth. Interestingly, the author looks at how moral discourse, and especially the notion and language of virtue, were used by the szlachta themselves in defense of their traditional privileges and in an attempt to reform what became visible even to them — that is, the decline of the noble republic. With the advantage of an outsider’s perspective, Dr. Wagner-Rundell narrows his gaze (the book would have been more accurately subtitled “the politics of virtue in early eighteenth-century Poland-Lithuania”) to a particularly pregnant six-year moment during the Great Northern War, between 1712 and 1717, when an extraordinary meeting of the Commonwealth Sejm (1712–13), a noble confederation against the Saxon king Augustus II (Tarnogród Confederation, 1715), and the eventual compromise between the king and the confederates (Treaty of Warsaw, 1717) offered a true reforming moment the likes of which was not seen again until the ascension of Stanisław August Poniatowski (1732–98) some fifty years later. Being the only enfranchised category of citizens (together with the king and the Senate, which formed the other two estates of the nation), the szlachta in the early part of the eighteenth century thus existed as the only possible source of reform. After all, in the end, it was the noble reformers such as Hugo Kołłątaj (1750–1812) and Stanisław August Poniatowski who, at the brilliant yet tragic sunset of the commonwealth, wrote the Third of May Constitution into national consciousness and international memory.

By analyzing the language of political treatises published at the time in question — the early eighteenth-century productions (all written between 1700 and 1709), such as Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski’s De Vanitate Consiliorum, Stanisław Dunin Karwicki’s De Ordinanda Republica, Jerzy Dzieduszycki’s Traktat o elekcyi królów polskich, and the anonymous Eclipsis Poloniae Orbi Publico Demonstrata — Dr. Wagner-Rundell establishes that the classical concept of virtue, defined as the subjugation of one’s private interest in the name of the common good, was absolutely at the forefront of Polish-Lithuanian noble discourse, and stood as a ready precept and recipe for the improvement of the commonwealth. The social, military, and political ills that ailed the republic were hardly seen as in need of an institutional alteration, but rather of only a moral one. If virtue was to once again rule the commonwealth, if every noble, king, senator, and minister acted morally, selflessly, and virtuously, then the ancient constitution of the commonwealth, inclusive of its noble liberties and mechanisms intended to enshrine them, would once again be restored to glory and power. Restoration of virtue was equated with the reform of government.

This is fascinating stuff, painted perhaps with slightly broad strokes, but ones that can be used to continue comparative analysis between commonwealth reform ideology and that of other republics, such as is done, rather haphazardly and almost forcibly, it must be admitted, in the case of Poland and early modern Great Britain at the end of this monograph. If there is a failing in all of this it is that of a too narrow chronological focus, as the author — like his full title suggests — attempts to extrapolate the language and meaning of virtue from a very small window of time and three or four primary sources to the entire early modern period: a grandiose generalization that could use a bit more exegesis and must, in order to be accepted or modified, include analyses of late seventeenth- and late eighteenth-century reforming moments.