Abstract
One of the main debates within contemporary political philosophy is undoubtedly a reading of a concept of liberty, whose most famous case is probably represented by the typology of Isaiah Berlin that has been however forced to face plenty of reviews so far. As the most systematic one we can consider observations of Q.
Skinner and P. Pettit, who rejected the aforementioned simple dichotomy by stressing a specific republican concept of liberty as non-domination.
Their efforts have been supported by a conviction that one can identify an understanding of liberty in European tradition which distances itself both from strictly individualist but also collectivist way of thinking, because it claims that a man can be free even if he has to obey the laws, but only under the condition that these laws have been adopted by the common will of all citizens in a free republic. Observing this tradition is however full of Western stereotypes, because republican concept is usually limited to a transfer of Roman Ciceronian ideas via Machiavelli to the radical proponents of popular sovereignty in England and Netherlands.
This common omitting of Eastern European development thus should lead us to urgent question: if a Polish aristocratic identity was based on a strong identification with political system, why couldn't we claim that there has been some kind of theory of practice in Polish thought of that time - a coherent concept of liberty which followed from the patterns of political behaviour and which could have represented some Eastern European pillar of the "third" republican concept of liberty as non-domination?