ABSTRACT
The term “virtue” is treated, in this chapter, as a certain cover term that encapsulates an entire set of concepts and ideas together forming a unified vision of the mutual relationship between individuals and the community. The political discussions held in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth fit into the antique traditions of deliberations on the state, in which ethics remained closely linked to politics. This chapter describes the changes that took place over the 200 years of the Commonwealth’s existence – from the Renaissance deliberations on the necessity of civic virtues, to the empty bemoaning of lost virtues in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as manifestations of a crisis of political thought, through attempts to reject the discourse of virtue made around the mid-eighteenth century, all the way to its astonishing revival under the influence of Rousseau’s concepts in the 1770s and 1780s.
