https://doi.org/10.21697/zp.2017.17.1.10
Summary
This article is a review of Jan Sowa’s book Fantomowe ciało króla. Peryferyjne zmagania z nowoczesną formą (The Phantom Body of the King: Peripheral Struggles with a Modern Form, TAiWPN, Kraków: UNIVERSITAS, 2011, pp. 572). Some academic circles treat this book as the discovery of “a new paradigm for research in the disciplines of history.” The reviewers, historians of the Polish State and its law, challenge the book’s scholarship and qualify it as an example of pseudo-scholarship and sham academia. In his description of economic, social, and political relations in the First Polish Republic in 1572-1795 J. Sowa commits a series of flagrant methodological errors. In particular, very often he ignores the facts or interprets them on the basis of presuppositions. The “reconceptualisation” he embarks on is conducted on the basis of a knowledge of history at the level presented in grammar-school textbooks, with no hint of the necessary analysis of the sources. His use of the historical material is selective and notoriously ignorant of the realities. The aspect of his book which qualifies especially for the label of pseudo-scholarship is his psychoanalysis of Polish history based on the Lacanian methodology, which has been pulled to pieces by critics like A. Sokal and J. Bricot for the use it makes of mathematics. Sowa’s fundamental hypothesis that there was no Polish State after 1572 – that the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania was “a phantom body of the king” – is an absurdity due to its author’s failure to understand Ernst Kantorowicz’s theory of the king’s two bodies, physical and political, and hence its misapplication to the realities of Polish history. The Jagiellonian kingdom which preceded the First Republic was never the body politic of its monarch, but a collective body politic with a recognised, enfranchised legal status as the Corpus Regni or Corona Regni Poloniae. The Polish-Lithuanian Republic most definitely continued to exist as a state after the extinction of the House of Jagiellon in 1572, right up to 1795; and neither the right of all who were enfranchised to take part in the election of its monarch nor the practice of liberum veto deprived that state of its statehood as a legal entity. Sowa’s claim that the First Polish Republic was not a state is not founded on any theory of the state, which makes it even more unwarranted as scholarship. The book is also wrong on objective facts, such as the alleged permanence of the borders along the Elbe and Danube. The aprioristic assumption of the superiority of absolute monarchy over the First Republic’s mixed monarchy is at odds with the opinions expressed in the recent historiography. The scholarship of Sowa’s book is further undermined by his numerous borrowings from the work of others without the requisite acknowledgement.
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