Kazimierz Baran to promote the well being of an individual and not vice versa. The idea that an individual should be blindlv subordinated to the State without trving to understand and accept the goals pursued by it, was totally alien to the line of thinking inherited from the past. Legal history research generally confirmed that in the old Constitution the emphasis was laid on self-governmental devices with no roomleft for the centralized bureaucracy of the absolutley ruled organisms. During the large breakthrough, in the early 1980’s, when Solidarty came to being, the regime was for the first time forced to sign a kind of Agreement with the representatives of the workers who acted in the capacity of absolutley independent body politic. The Agreement provided for the repairing of certain social grievances articulated by the representatives of the people. For the legal historian this sounded like a revival of the idea of a social contract to which the nobility of the past so often resorted whenever they, fearing absolutism dominium., discussed constitutional problems with their monarch. One way or the other, legal history in Poland the moment it began to appear as a specific discipline at the end of the 18^1^ century, traditionally performed a certain practical function. And it seems that these were historical cirumstances which became formative of the tasks assigned to it. As early as the century legal historians had to face the arguments of the partitioning powers, whether the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns or Romanoffs, who by 1795 causedfinis Poloniae and who tried to give reason to why they erased Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth fromthe map of Europe. The cliché that they tried to exploit was that of anarchy. The works of the early Polish legal historians had to resist the doctrine demonstrated in Claude Rulhier’s work Histoire de Vanarchie en Pologne.'^ The doctrine of Rulhier coincided with that supported by the partitioners who argued that Poland fell as a result of its own internal anarchv. The proportion of anarchy allegedly involved some threat to the meighbouring countries. The truth was different: the partitions happened exactely at the time when a successful reform of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, known also as the Republic of the two nations, was being implemented. Just before its second partition Poland-Lithuania adopted the Constitution of 3 May 1791. Prior to the French Constitution adopted in September the same year, this was the first so exhaustive Act in Continental history. It provided for the rules extending to all niveaus of the life of the nation. In governmental sphere it provided for both political (through vote of no confidence) as well as constitutional responsibility of ministers. The King was reduced to the position of the organ that can do no wrong because he could do nothing without what he did being endorsed by the respective ministers. The powers were separated and the laws were produced only in parliament through majority vote. ’ Cf. Stanislaw Grodziski, O zadaniach i obon'iazkach historii panstiz'a i pran'a polskicgo — ic'czoraj i dzis, Czasopismo Prawno-Historyczne, vol. XLVI, 1994, Zesz. 1-2, p. 2 1 If. 306
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