Polish-Lithuanian Republican Mythology: opening the research field for a new study of Czech political thought?

Abstract

This paper analyses the options to apply the model of Polish-Lithuanian republicanism – studied mainly for the 16th–19th century context – for the research of the Czech historical tradition of political thought. By doing so, the article tries to deconstruct the traditional national narrativization of the Czech domestic political discourse as a gradual evolution of classical liberalism and ethnic nationalism (i.e., the narrative created during the National Revival and emphasized dominantly again after 1989) with the help of suggestion that the Czech historical political thought might have reflected specific interpretations of political values (liberty, equality, common good, etc.) that have been already identified in the Polish-Lithuanian aristocratic milieu. Contrary to the Polish historiography that reflects and analyses the domestic tradition of republican political thought on a large scale, the Czech historical science still lacks appropriate theoretical and methodological tools to interpret the Bohemian (and later Czech) discourse of political theory from the perspective of Central European republican tradition. Hence, this paper identifies the main impetuses for such research on possible patterns of Czech historical republicanism, including the challenge to deconstruct the traditional narrativization of the Czech “national story” constructed mainly at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The operationalization of the republican theory in the Central European context – based primarily on the current state of research of the Polish-Lithuanian historical case revealing new contextual meanings of political concepts such as mixed government, liberty, equality, or common good – opens the space for re-interpretation of fundamental Czech political and civic values that have been so far dominantly understood in the framework of the “victory march” of liberal, democratic and ethno-national principles. Such reinterpretation – enriching the perspectives of both Czech as well as broader Central European study of political ideas – is therefore suggested in case of two relevant historical cases: 1) the Bohemian political thought during the 1618 anti-Habsburg uprising; 2) the Czech political discourse in the 1848 revolution.