BILLIONAIRES ARE A RISK TO OUR DEMOCRACY: PAWEŁ JASIENICA

Paweł Jasienica was not a scholar. He was an essayist. And precisely this allowed him to write one of the most important books on history. The book’s subject is the history of Poland but its importance is universal: to political scientist and activists and voters world over; today more so than ever.

For three hundred years, Poland was a regional hegemon in Eastern Europe: rich, powerful, and influential. She was also an exception in a sea of absolute monarchies: a constitutional monarchy, with an elected king, parliament, independent courts, habeas corpus, freedom of speech, religion, and press. Poland was not perfect, her constitution was a work in progress; but for many centuries its government worked, and then—it stopped working. Poland was attacked by her neighbors and devoured. Every Pole wants to know why, and every democrat in the world needs to know why

1

Scholars’ books tend to start out like the opera at the court of Louis XIV: with all the pompous machinery of learning, references, bibliography, and discussion; but mostly they do so only to produce something small and grey in the end, a kind of intellectual mouse: a minuscule detail, a marginal remark, a footnote; a perfectly forgettable addition to our already vast knowledge of the field; and even then this is hedged with doubt and proviso.

Why do scholars write like this? Because they write for other scholars, people who actually find these small, mousy things fascinating and spend their entire lives chasing them; and who ruthlessly shoot down any attempt to make a broad, general, sweeping claim unsupported by a crashing body of evidence.

But Paweł Jasienica was not a scholar. He was an essayist:

“The books I write make no claim to the status of scholarly works; they are neither textbooks nor popularizations of scholarship. They are simply essays. […] An essay enjoys the same rights as drama, poetry, or the novel.”[1]

And precisely this allowed him to write a three-volume history of Poland which shall forever remain the best-read history of Poland and which shall never be bested by any written by a professional historian.

Jasienica wrote fascinating books precisely because was an essayist. His works are fascinating because they propose large, daring, brave theories of how things work; large patterns of character and history. The ideas are not always worked out in minute detail, and they are never supported with crushing heaps of dull evidence; but because Jasienica was exceptionally well-read and insightful and put a lot of thought into them, his ideas were always original and engaging and they always stimulated thinking and prompted a response. Fifty-five years after his death, Jasienica’s ideas engage us still, the fifth generation of readers.

2

In his Polska anarchia (1988, posthumous),1 Jasienica offered an interpretation of the political and social mechanisms that led the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from its extraordinary success to structural paralysis to eventual downfall. The book is not a chronicle of events but a diagnosis: Jasienica is asking why a state that once covered a vast part of Europe, defeated powerful enemies, and possessed a unique political culture, gradually lost the capacity to govern itself.

At the center of his argument lies the paradox of Polish freedom. The Commonwealth was built on an unusually broad concept of political liberty for the nobility (szlachta), expressed in elective monarchy, parliamentary government, legal equality within the noble estate, and strong protections against royal absolutism. For a long time, this system worked. In the 15th and early 16th centuries, it fostered civic engagement, political responsibility, and a genuine sense of ownership of the state among the ruling class. Jasienica stresses that early Poland was not “anarchic” at all; it was orderly precisely because its political culture restrained excess.

The problem, as Jasienica sees it, was not freedom itself but the erosion of its political culture that once made freedom workable. Over time, mechanisms designed to protect liberty — especially the liberum veto (the principle of unanimity in voting) and confederations—legal forms permitting armed resistance to authority — lost their original moral and institutional context. What had been safeguards against tyranny became tools for private interest, factional struggle, and foreign manipulation. Jasienica repeatedly emphasizes that institutions do not collapse overnight; they decay when the habits and values that sustain them disappear.

3

A major theme of the book is the growing divorce between private wealth and public responsibility brought about by growing income disparity. As magnates’ (today we would say, billionares’) fortunes expanded, their loyalty to the state weakened. The richest families increasingly treated the Commonwealth as a resource to be exploited rather than a common good to be defended. Men with private armies and able to buy any judge they wanted felt no need to maintain capable national armed forces or to shore up an incorruptible judiciary.

Their power, money, and foreign connections seemed to them to insulate them from consequences. They even seemed to them to justify treason: Szczęsny Potocki, one of the magnates who invited the last Russian intervention in the country because he refused to countenance increased taxation, had himself buried in the uniform of a Russian general. He had felt too powerful and too important to be bound by small concerns like patriotism, loyalty to a particular polity, or loyalty to his fellow citizens. He felt that his riches entitled him to choose his nationality.

Yet, history showed that precisely these people—the men and women who felt the least obligation to preserve their country, stood the most to lose from its destruction. Polish magnate families fared poorly under the new regimes. To Russian and Prussian rulers, they were just uppity foreigners who needed to be taught a lesson and whose fortunes were just too tempting: very few Polish magnate fortunes outlived Poland by even a generation.

4

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had arisen in the fourteenth century from a union of the densely populated Kingdom of Poland, with a fairly homogeneous political class, and a sparsely populated Lithuania, where a small group of powerful families controlled most of the wealth and income. In comparing the internal politics of the two member states of the federation, Jasienica draws our attention to the far greater political stability of the former. In the Kingdom of Poland, the noble class was composed of men with broadly similar economic status, and therefore similar powers and similar challenges. They had a common interest in defense, justice, and the rule of law, none of which they could secure alone, and therefore they required the cooperation of others to secure these goods. They had a strong motivation to find compromise solutions to the political challenges facing them.

Jasienica contrasts this with the constant political instability in Lithuania, where powerful actors frequently felt strong enough to challenge the state’s institutions, leading to ineffective law enforcement and social unrest, as well as intransigent party politics: billionaires don’t need their fellow citizens, so they don’t need to compromise with any of them. Jasienica notes that as income inequality in the Kingdom of Poland grew and acquired its own billionaires (often through intermarriage with Lithuanians), Polish politics began to resemble Lithuanian politics, with the new Polish billionaires increasingly acting like their Lithuanian counterparts.

Jasienica rejects the comforting myth that Poland fell because it was uniquely flawed or backward. On the contrary, he repeatedly situates Polish developments within broader European trends. Absolutist monarchies in the West solved political conflict by concentrating power; Poland chose pluralism and legality. That choice was not irrational, but it demanded discipline, compromise, and restraint. When those disappeared, pluralism turned into paralysis. Anarchy, in Jasienica’s sense, is therefore not chaos in the streets but the inability to compromise to make binding collective decisions.

In the end, Polska anarchia is less a book about the past than a meditation on political culture. Jasienica suggests that no constitution, however ingenious, can survive the loss of civic ethics. Law without loyalty, freedom without responsibility, and rights without obligation lead not to liberty but to impotence. The Commonwealth did not perish because it valued freedom too highly, but because it forgot why freedom had once required self-limitation. And it forgot it because it produced billionaires.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it: the insight is obvious. Billionaires are a risk to our democracy—not because they are somehow more devious or evil than the rest of us, but because their interests are not aligned with ours. They don’t care about common defense, justice, public education or healthcare because they either can secure these goods themselves or think they can. Heck, they don’t even care about roads and bridges, they’ll just take the jet. To them, we are not fellow citizens, indispensable partners with whom to secure common goals; to them, we are a tax and regulatory burden. A billionaire does not need the republic. We do—and the only way to align a billionaire’s interests with ours is to tax him back to earth.

[1] Paweł Jasienica: Polska Jagiellonów, v. 2. Warszawa 1963, s. 234.