Abstract
The main focus of this paper is to put the so called Polish question into the broader context of the Enlightenment thought by providing an evidence that the considerations about the proper way of political reforms issued from deeper levels of philosophical assumptions about human nature. To achieve this objective, the study analyses two distinct approaches to the Polish matters, i.e. the observations made by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Stanisław Leszczyński, whose comparison should be seen as legitimate and appropriate because their former philosophical conclusions represent two distinct and even antagonistic positions.
Although Leszczyński and Rousseau clashed over the ontological and epistemological questions concerning human being and later similarly drew attention to the Polish political system as well, these works dealing with Poland have been researched and interpreted just separately so far. On the contrary, this study strive for double comparative approach, which tries to clarify whether there is some strong causal dependency between the attitudes of both authors in their debate about human nature and their conclusions regarding the Polish political issues.
Moreover, this enables us to determine to what extent one can understand the Polish question as the political part of philosophical dichotomy of the Enlightenment.