Jean-Jacques Rousseau i kwestia polska. Filozofia nowoczesności państwa i jej krytyka .......... 25

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU AND THE POLISH QUESTION: THE PHILOSOPHY OF STATE MODERNITY AND ITS CRITIQUE

This article offers a reinterpretation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland as a work of not merely constitutional or political significance, but above all of metapolitical importance. The central thesis is that Rousseau’s reform project was not intended as a program of administrative modernization, but rather as an attempt to preserve the political community from a form of modernity that weakens the moral foundations of public life and reduces citizenship to subordination to state administration. The analysis focuses on three closely related themes: the morality of politics, the political community, and liberty. Within this framework, honor, virtue, and patriotism are examined as the axiological foundations of the republic; the tension between popular sovereignty and the social boundaries of citizenship is explored; and Rousseau’s republican conception of liberty is situated between the classical tradition and modern liberalism. The article draws on recent interpretations of Rousseau developed within Polish reflections on republicanism, inspired in particular by Jerzy Michalski’s seminal study Rousseau and Polish Republicanism. By bringing these receptions into dialogue with selected contemporary philosophical and social diagnoses, the article presents Rousseau as a n acute critic of political modernity whose reflections on Poland remain relevant as an inquiry into the moral conditions of a free and enduring state.