Common Wealth, Common Good: The Politics of Virtue in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania

Common Wealth, Common Good is a study of the political thought and language of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It argues that Polish-Lithuanian politicians and commentators saw their political system primarily in moral terms. According to this view, the Commonwealth’s main purpose was to ensure government in the common good (i.e. virtuous government). The Commonwealth could only survive as long as its rulers and citizens behaved virtuously, pursuing the common good rather than any private self-interest.Benedict Wagner-Rundell shows how Polish-Lithuanian politicians and commentators therefore interpreted the Commonwealth’s political dysfunction (and near-collapse) in the early eighteenth century in moral terms, as the result of corruption and a loss of virtue. Efforts to reform the Commonwealth’s government therefore aimed at restoring virtue among its rulers and citizens.