Historians of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth have traditionally presented the
liberum veto, a parliamentary practice that allowed any member of parliament to object to
any measure and thereby suspend deliberations, as a result of Polish citizens’ (the
szlachta’s) peculiar political culture, particularly their attachment to the principles of
consensus and unanimity. This assumption led scholars to focus on theoretical
justifications for the abuse of the veto that began during the second half of the
seventeenth century and by the middle of the eighteenth century had paralyzed the Polish
parliament (the Sejm) entirely. Until now, no one has considered the advent and
persistence of the veto in the context of the long struggle between the two central
political ideologies of the early modern period, republicanism and absolutism. By
examining the writings of republican citizens who used and defended the veto during the
heated battle over constitutional reform waged in the Commonwealth during the 1660s
and early 1670s, we see that the veto was initially embraced as a tool to defend
republican liberty against the illegal designs of a king bent on monarchical reforms. This
tactic proved disastrous for the citizens who first used the veto to suspend parliaments as
their opponents quickly embraced the practice for their own selfish ends. The result was
partisan gridlock as well as a theoretical impasse between those who advocated a well-
egulated (but unfree) monarchy and those who advocated a free (but chaotic) republic.
Not until Stanisław Dunin Karwicki wrote his De ordinanda republica in 1704 or 1705
were republican writers able to propose a constitution that guaranteed both efficient
execution of laws and security without sacrificing the positive freedoms Poles understood
to be the proper end of any constitution. Although Karwicki’s reforms were never put
into practice, they shed invaluable light on the struggle that defined seventeenth-century
politics across Europe and that in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth led to the
creation and curious evolution of the liberum veto.