The Accomplished Senator, by Laurence Grimald Gozliski, 1568 A.D.
(For professors, college students, and interested adults.) The paragraphs below are, first, taken from the Preface, written by Blanka Rosenstiel, Founder and President of the American Institute of Polish Culture, and second, from the Introduction, written by Professor Kenneth Thompson, Director of the White Burkett Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia.
“In 1568, a Polish statesman named Wawrzyniec Grzymala Goslicki (Laurence Grimald Gozliski) planted the seed of political philosophy which would bear fruit in the American Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Goslicki (1530-1607), whose latinized name is Laurentius Grimaldus Goslicius, published that year in Venice a remarkably modern treatise on statecraft entitled De Optimo Senatore (The “Perfect” or “Accomplished” Senator). A second printing came out of Basel in 1593 and English translations appeared no less than three times, in 1598, 1607, and 1733.
The importance of The Accomplished Senator cannot be overstated. A renaissance work by a true “Renaissance Man,” it was studied and debated by such leading political writers as Johnm Locke, Helvetius, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and others who adopted in their own writings many of the principles enunciated by Goslicki.
The Accomplished Senator is the product of Goslicki’s broad and rigorous education at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow and the Universities of Padua and Bologna. The book is also a product of his astute analysis of the contemporary political conditions in Poland and elsewhere in Europe. As Minister of State and Secretary to King Sigismund II of Poland (and a Roman Catholic Bishop), he was uniquely situated to observe and evaluate diverse political systems, laws, and public servants.
Thomas Jefferson (through his reading of Locke, if not directly from Goslicki’s treatise) incorporated in the Declaration of Independence these same justifications for severing American ties to England and for forming a new government. The Constitution of the United States is similarly indebted to Goslicki for defining ideas of a modern, democratic from of government, accepted now four hundred years later by most of the world’s civilized nations.
The Accomplished Senator cannot be dismissed as merely yet another work of great historical significance. Public officials and the electorate would do well to study his portrait of the ideal public servant. There is still much to be learned from this remarkable Polish statesman.”
Blanka A. Rosenstiel
Founder and President
The American Institute of Polish Culture
“The Accomplished Senator is a remarkable work of political philosophy and statecraft that is timeless. Goslicki is a European thinker more than a Polish nationalist. The universality of his thought is demonstrated in the response in England to his writings in the period from the 16th through the 18th century. While his concern is for the government and the political life of Poland, his writings are addressed to those concerned with governance everywhere. He rests his political theory on Aristotle; the traditions of state he emphasizes are rooted in Greek and Roman political institutions.
The Accomplished Senator is a classic work because it deals with all the fundamental questions: freedom and order, liberty and justice, aristocracy and democracy, law and politics, the electors and the people and authority, and the limits on power. From Aristotle, Goslicki draws on the analogy comparing the state and the body, the necessity of the state for both moral and political life, restraint and regulation as a hedge against excess, the relation between the law and the sovereign, and the law as limited by expediency and necessity. The Accomplished Senator is a counsel to the ruler on war and peace, justice and equality. The Senator is the epitome of the practical philosopher. Not all philosophers can be statesmen; Goslicki in particular excludes theorists who shun the discipline of hard choices within institutions and philosophers who are recluses and solitary figures immersed in speculation. Schools and universities should be training grounds of virtues and wisdom, not of a ‘sleepy, dreaming, and speculative sort of knowledge.’
Goslicki warns against moral decay and the three dangers he sees inherent in democracy, which he praises but finds historically sometimes inferior to aristocracy and monarchy. However, he also defends democracy. Nonetheless, he discovers in democracy a tendency toward personal gain at the expense of the honest and right action, unrestrained passions that may degenerate into absolute government, and tyranny of the majority, which can override justice. The masses are changeable and given to excess and extravagance. Tyranny by the majority is even more dangerous than that of the individual ruler. Nonetheless, Goslicki calls for limitations on the executive, equality of all citizens, and equal rights before the law. There can be no democracy without freedom but freedom presupposes responsibility and the moral life.
Because of the universality of the message, The Accomplished Senator speaks to our times as well as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Because of his love of freedom, which has lived on through Poland’s many adversities, his message finds resonance in the differing experiences of democracy, especially in England and the United States. Not least the concern for practical morality and prudential judgments in politics strikes a sympathetic chord in the midst of present problems. In a striking way, the problems that are addressed in The Accomplished Senator are our problems as much as they are Poland’s. As peoples and political leaders struggle to preserve and practice democracy, the writings from another century strike to the heart of our own age. Senators and congressmen, teachers and philosophers can profit from reflecting on the lessons of The Accomplished Senator.
Professor Kenneth W. Thompson
Director of the White Burkett Miller
Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia
March 23, 1992
