ABSTRACT
This closing chapter considers what concepts were absent from the political discourse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The issue of property is presented as the most striking example of such a conspicuously absence. If property did appear in the Polish-Lithuanian discussions about the state, it belonged to the private rather than political sphere, and it was not a constitutive element building up the political universe. This was largely due to the socio-political situation, in which it was membership in the noble estate that provided the basis for political rights and freedoms and served as their guarantee. The concept of property did not come to be included in the political discourse until the 1770s and 1780s, when such notions as natural laws and the social contract were recalled. This shift was, on the one hand, an indicator of the change and modernization of the discourse and, on the other, a very important – if not the most important – factor driving that very same process.
