Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves- Professor of Political Philosophy
- Jagiellonian University
Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves
- Professor of Political Philosophy
- Jagiellonian University
About
64
Publications
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267
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Introduction
My current research is focused on two international projects: 1) 'The Conditions of Civil Society in CEE Thirty Years After' funded by NCN and conducted with four research partners: Patrice McMahon (University Nebraska-Lincoln), Paual M. Pickering (William and Mary), Lisa Sundstrom (British Columbia) and Paulina Pospieszna (Adam Mickiewicz University).
2. 'Recovering European Parliamentary Culture, 1500-1700'. Partners: Paulina Kewes (Oxford), Paul Seaward (Histor of Parliament Trust), R. Frost.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2013 - present
February 2011 - February 2012
October 2002 - September 2013
Publications
Publications (64)
This article has two aims. First, it presents an analysis of Adam Ferguson’s concept of civil society and polity in the context of the civic republican tradition originated in Aristotle and the philosophy of stoicism. Civil society tradition began in ancient Greece and Ferguson renewed the concept in modern times. The contemporary revival of the id...
The model of deliberative democracy poses a number of difficult questions about individual rationality, public reason and justification, public spiritedness, and an active and supportive public sphere. It also raises the question about what kind of civic involvement is required for the practices of democratic deliberation to be effective. The aim o...
The aim of this article is to analyze the problem of civic and political participation in the postcommunist context from the perspective of contemporary democratic theory, the concept of democratic consolidation, and the thesis of the "weakness of civil society in post-communist countries." It argues that the institutional approach to democratizati...
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the civic republican approach to corruption helps us understand the complexity of the problem of corruption during the process of post-communist democratization. Such an approach brings to the fore the correlation between the institutional and the social dimensions of corruption, and offers a broader per...
The aim of this article is, first, to provide a justification for the continued usefulness of the historical term ‘civil society’, and second, to examine in this context the challenges arising ahead in the postcommunist European societies which, after the collapse of communism, have adopted the model of liberal democracy. One of their crucial goals...
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is considered a laboratory for both democratization and democratic backsliding, but little is known still about how ordinary citizens perceive and make decisions about whether and how to civically engage. To address this gap, we use focus group interviews to supplement our data from nationally representative surveys...
Activism in Hard Times in Central and Eastern Europe elevates the voices of civic activists from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and analyzes a wealth of information to generate new insights into how activism in the region manages to be vibrant, diverse, and consequential. Because of these countries’ unique historical trajectory, CEE activists hav...
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...
RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The aim of this article is to examine and compare two republican approaches to politics and res publica presented in the sixteenth century by Wawrzyniec Grzymala Goślicki and Gasparo Contarini. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: Both authors define the core elements of a republican scientia civilis but emphasize different aspects...
Transitions, democratization and recent democratic backsliding in CEE provide a rich context for examining the meaning and shifting of civic activism and how people participate and organize in civil society today. This article offers a fresh and comparative analysis based on empirical data on the question of what motivates formal and informal activ...
In this article we argue that what is called today a ‘democratic backsliding’ or de-consolidation should be analysed, at least in some cases, as a liberal-constitutional backsliding for which the pandemic of Covid-19 adds a new impetus and creates the situation where violation of constitutionality of law might become a norm. In our theoretical cons...
Celem tego artykułu jest krótka analiza republikańskiej koncepcji wolności przedstawianej w polskiej i pozapolskiej teorii republikańskiej XVI wieku. Punktem wyjścia rozważań jest teza głosząca, że kategoria wolności w teorii republikańskiej jest ściśle związana z namysłem i ustaleniami dotyczącymi istoty i celu wspólnoty politycznej, określanej w...
DEFINICJA POJĘCIA: Jako kategoria normatywna wielokulturowość określa fundamentalne zasady, na jakich mogą współistnieć różne grupy etniczne i kulturowe w ramach państwa. Wiąże się z tym teza, iż różnorodność kulturowa jest wartością zasługującą na uznanie i ochronę.ANALIZA HISTORYCZNA POJĘCIA: Zjawisko wielokulturowości trwa od dawna, jednak norma...
One of the main motivations for measuring the weakness or strength of civil society is to obtain a reliable basis for understanding the dynamics of its development as well as its social and political potential. In this article, we argue that the paradox of the “weakness of civil society” in Central and Eastern Europe can be explained by insufficien...
In this essay, we call for a new approach to representative assemblies of early modern Europe and beyond. While there are vast national historiographies on their legal constitutional structure, little effort has been made to reconstruct the cultural and transnational dimension of such bodies, a phenomenon we describe as ‘parliamentary culture’. We...
Thirty years ago, many credited civil society for communism’s sudden and mostly peaceful demise in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In the decades since, scholars have debated the definition, structure, impact, and strength of civil societies in this region. This article introduces a special section that provides theoretical, methodological, and e...
The developments that took place in Central and Easter Europe (CEE) over the last three decades have consequences for how researchers define and understand the concept of civil society. This article revisits four major approaches to civil society that were developed after 1989 and provides reasons for a reconceptualization in light of new research...
This article examines a new phase in democracy promotion in Central and Eastern European countries that recently have faced the process of shrinking civic space and democratic backsliding. In our case study, we analyse systematically the voices and strategies of Polish NGOs involved in democracy promotion at home and abroad as a response to these n...
https://www.cambridge.org/pl/academic/subjects/history/history-ideas-and-intellectual-history/polish-republican-discourse-sixteenth-century?format=HB
This article addresses the question of cultural preconditions for the second birth of capitalism in the post-communist context of Central and Eastern Europe with a special reference to Poland and Hungary. The theoretical background of the analysis presented is the so-called cultural paradigm and the concept of economic culture which can be used in...
In recent years, political theory has benefited from a neo-republican perspective that brought to the fore the conception of a ‘republican democracy’ which assumes a robust public sphere, civic involvement, and vigilance, as well as a neo-Roman conception of liberty understood as the absence of arbitrary power. Neo-republicanism, however, has not e...
The term we are using in this publication, ‘the Jagiellonian ideas’, is a very rich and broad category that includes intellectual and cultural developments of two centuries. I am going to focus on certain aspects of the political discourse and political culture that matured in
the late fifteenth and at the beginning of the sixteenth century along...
Democratic consolidation in Central and Eastern Europe: The role of civil society
The main question of the article is the connection between democratic consolidation in post-Soviet states and civil society development. Even though such a thesis is very popular in political science, it cannot be borne out in present-day policy. And even if we descr...
Rousseau’s philosophy can be situated as a continuum between the ancient and the modern traditions; we argue that it does not fully belong to either and this is particularly evident in his discussion of liberty. Our point of departure is a view that in order to grasp peculiarity of Rousseaus’ understanding of liberty we need to go beyond the libera...
Normative political theory was developed in ancient Greece and provided the foundations for political research. Its role was never questioned until the rise of logical positivism and empirical social science with its claims to be truly scientific' that is, value neutral. Th e article starts with a short overview of this controversy and provides an...
The Revivals of the Jagiellonian Idea: Political and Normative Contexts
The article has two major aims. First, it provides a short analysis of three revivals of the Jagiellonian idea which took place in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries in different historical and political circumstances. Second, it locates these revivals within the polit...
The aim of this paper is to re-examine the well-known distinction between
civic and ethnic nationalisms and its application to the Central European context after
the First World War. Although scholars associate ethnic nationalism primarily with this
part of Europe, the establishment of multiethnic states such as the Polish Republic, Yugoslavia
or C...
The book contributes to the ongoing discussion and research on civil society in the context of democracy and democratization. It provides a theoretical analysis of civil society, participation, the public sphere and democratic consolidation in light of normative democratic theory and the challenges of democratic transformation in Central and Easter...
The aim of this introduction is not to present a survey of various accounts of political and civic education, and reflect on whether they could be somehow utilized in the process of democratic consolidation in new democracies. It attempts instead to explore potential sources, modes and purposes of a political education seen primarily as learning an...
The republican tradition of the First Polish Republic (Rzeczpospolita) evolved
from the period between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century producing an
extremely reach conceptual understanding of politics. The aim of this article is to
explore and discuss both the continuity and change that took place in the Polish republican
discourse in the...
Celem artykułu jest krótka analiza neorepublikańskiej filozofii państwa w oparciu o dwie propozycje teoretyczne, dwa nieco odmienne stanowiska republikańskie i spór, jaki zarysował się między głoszącymi je autorami: Michaelem Sandelem i Philipem Pettitem. Ukazując zasadnicze różnice między republikanizmem substancjalnym a republikanizmem instrument...
This article has two aims; first it provides a conceptual analysis of the main terms related to the contemporary revival of interest in the republican tradition such as respublica, classical republican tradition and modern republicanism. This conceptual framework can be used in the research on republicanism in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rz...
"One of the main goals of this book is to demonstrate that the Polish republican discourse of the sixteenth century was not only influenced by the ancient republican tradition, but can in itself be seen as a contribution to the classical republican tradition. The most important aspect of the approach presented in this book is its focus on the norma...
The book presents a historical and theoretical analysis of the concept of civil society, which has been renewed in contemporary political theory. The concept itself is important both for its theoretical potential and the traditions of political thought in which it is rooted. The term “civil society” has been widely used in Poland for over a decade,...
This article addresses the question of how far democratic consolidation in post-communist countries depends on the development of flourishing civil societies. In order to do that I discuss two different civil society discourses, before 1989 and after 1989, which applied different meanings of the concept. I also discuss the reasons why the developme...
In this paper I would like to address one of the main features of communist ideology which is its one-dimensional conception of the person that totally undermined the spiritual dimension of human beings and that resulted in a rationally constructed political and social order. Such an approach can be called an anthropological error. It accorded with...
The aim of this article is to provide a critical analysis of the development and evolution of some main concepts in the early modern republican tradition that developed in Italy, especially in Florence. It is argued that Italian republicanism was not only influenced by humanism, but also by concepts in legal and political
philosophy formulated in t...
This article analyses the impact of globalization on liberal democracy as a political system, which is particularly well suited to the nation state, and on the processes of democratization undertaken in recent years in many parts of the world. The challenges posed by globalization open up questions about how suitable liberal democratic government i...
I am looking at the conceptual history of the concept of civil society from Hobbes to Marx. Such
analysis extends the relevant categorical frameworks in use today. Also it allows to distinguish
premodern and modern layers in the concept indicating what versions have become questionable and
inadequate today. By properly identifying both the historic...
Questions
Question (1)
It seems that one of the crucial aspects of a neorepublican political philosophy should be a robust account of political (self-) education. As I can see it, it draws from the classical understanding of politics seen as a free public activity of persons and treats education primarily as learning not instruction. Political education is then concerned with reflexivity, self-knowledge and political awareness. It is a constant and conscious exercise in reflexivity on the principles and goals of a political community we live in. Would anyone like to comment on such an account of political (self-) education that seems to be largely missing in both today's political science and democratic theory?
