ABSTRACT
Freedom was the “glue” that bound together the political discourse of the noble class, the prism through which the political reality and citizens’ attitudes were assessed. This chapter analyses how it served as the supreme political value in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, an argument in disputes and also a certain political myth in its own right. It was not regarded as an innate right of every human being, but rather resulted from belonging to a political community, being a citizen. This way of understanding freedom provided a good tool for describing the political reality of the Rzeczpospolita, but it almost automatically excluded from deliberations all the inhabitants of the state who did not belong to the noble class. This did not begin to change until the 1770s.
