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Comment by wuschel | Hacker News Reader

I agree that Poland - and the east of Europe - seldomly appears in the western history lesson narrative.

Poland was liberal for it's time, yes, albeit only for the szlachta, a large part of the population that belonged to the privileged class of nobility. Peasants had not so much to gain access these times, especially in the former parts of Poland that are now Ukraine.

People of Jewish faith had strong privileges in Poland in the middle ages, which lead to the biggest diaspora in the world, a large fragmented community that was integrated into polish society in various degrees - as can be beautifully seen in the Jewish Museum in Warsaw.

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> Poland was liberal for it's time, yes, albeit only for the szlachta, a large part of the population that belonged to the privileged class of nobility. Peasants had not so much to gain access these times, especially in the former parts of Poland that are now Ukraine.

Just a note on the szlachta numbers - it was about 10% of the population.

Less if you count Lithuania. And only men had voting rights, so half of that.

But yeah, it was ahead of time.

> And only women had voting rights, so half of that.

Men :) Only men had voting rights.

Yeah, you know what I meant.

> Poland was liberal for it's time

It depends on how you define liberal. For example, Afganistan, Somalia, the Ukraine are very liberal nowadays: weak central government, weak central censorship, weak currency. Instead, warlords and gangs having the same functions – but it can be treated as liberal and democratic construction - you can always do the same and everybody has equal rights (kind of early US).

The most definitions include "the rule of law" (and you seem to be mistaken "limited" for "weak"):

> "Classical liberalism" is the term used to designate the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade. > > – https://mises.org/library/what-classical-liberalism

The parent comment, however, argues that all the liberties were only available to the nobility, not that it was liberal in a different sense of the word that we use nowadays.

Comparing renaissance-age Poland to any of the modern-day countries you've mentioned doesn't make sense to me (also, it's Ukraine, not "the Ukraine").

In ancient Greece, a great deal (or even most) of the population were slaves. Yet, it does not prevent us from treating their system as democracy and compare it with the modern democracies and "democracies".

The article mentions this fact:

> Poland had the szlachta, a broad citizen-warrior class that can be thought of as an upper middle class. This amounted to 10% of the population. That might sound like a very limited form of democracy, but it is the same percentage of the population as voted in the famous democracy of ancient Athens

I'd suggest reading the article if you haven't already. It doesn't argue or force a definition of 'liberal' or 'democratic' but describes the period of Polish history apparently poorly highlighted in the curriculum of US schools.

'Liberal' has many and varying definitions, but the notion that a polity is liberal if some of the bodies imposing repressive values and restraining trade aren't nation states doesn't have much currency outside the more perverse end of US anarchocapitalism. I don't think anybody whose reason hasn't been consumed with fanatical hatred of the IRS considers civil war between brutal local warlords to be a 'liberal and democratic construction'.

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