Name: Seminar: Re-Imagining Democracy in East Central Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century
Start: 2025-04-25T09:00:00+02:00
End: 2025-04-26T15:00:00+02:00
Location: Rynek Starego Miasta 31, 00-272 Warsaw, Poland

Seminar: Re-Imagining Democracy in East Central Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century
Organizers: Joanna Innes, Bartłomiej Błesznowski, Piotr Kuligowski, Mark Philp
Venue: Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw (Tadeusz Kościuszko Room)
Date: 25-26 April 2025
During the eighteenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was commonly considered, e.g. by Montesquieu, to exemplify an aristocratic polity. In the early nineteenth century, some Poles began to argue that this aristocratic heritage presented a major obstacle to the rebirth of the country. What was needed instead was the development of a democratic version of the Commonwealth (rooted by some in a different account of the past). The scene for this thinking was profoundly influenced by the French revolution, which put ‘democracy’ as a possible form for government and society in the modern world firmly on the agenda. However, it remained unclear in what form and even whether this ancient form could be adapted to modern circumstances. Poles – often exile Poles – became vigorous contributors to this conversation.
Nineteenth-century thought and practice around ‘democracy’ in relation to the lands of the former Commonwealth interacted with other changing circumstances. One was institutional change, as the various imperial powers who ruled over the partitions sponsored an uneven series of practical experiments in incorporating sections of the population into government. We now tend to associate democracy with representation. In the nineteenth century, the conceptual link was weaker, but there were interactions. Another strand of change was cultural, entailing change in ways in which the mass of the people related to politics, and the extent to which political concepts were shared across different sectors of the population. Changing ideas about nationhood, on the part of Poles and the various more and less powerful groups operating in the region also shaped changing ideas about what ‘democracy’ entailed.
In this workshop, we want to explore discourses and practices associated with attempts to imagine and create a democratic Poland, between the crisis of the old Commonwealth and the First World War, looking both at how such ideas were asserted and how they were challenged. Our focus will be on understandings of ‘democracy’ current at the time: we don’t aim to assess progress towards any modern idea about how things should be. We aim to set regional discourse about democracy in the context both of local institutional and cultural circumstances and in relation to wider, Euro-American and global developments.
We hope to encourage especially discussion of the period between the first partition and the 1863 uprising and its aftermath – a period relatively understudied in intellectual and conceptual history. In relation to the later period, we hope to encourage attention to situating research within a broader account of development and change: so that we can make different episodes in this history speak to one another.
Prospective participants are requested to contact Joanna Innes [joanna.innes[at]history.ox.ac.uk] and / or Piotr Kuligowski [[email protected]] to discuss the form of their participation: we envisage only short presentations, with as much time as possible left open for discussion.
Participants will need to fund their own travel and accommodation costs, though some subsidised accommodation will be available.