What does it mean to be Polish according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland
Qu’est-ce qu’être Polonais selon les Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne
Résumé
For Rousseau, the Polish problem is the construction of a national identity. Poland, a vast open plain threatened by powerful neighbors, cannot find any principle of resistance except in itself in the form of a Polish soul. In order to face danger, it is necessary to train the citizen by shaping all his passions and opinions in order to make him love and cultivate this identity which bears a Polish unity. A main difficulty, however, will be to generalize this identity originally rooted in a particular group: the nobility. Thus, responding to the bet of a situation of vital emergency, the Considerations represent themselves a kind of theoretical bet of Rousseau.