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Long before the American and French Revolutions, a Polish bishop wrote one of Europe’s most radical defenses of limited government and the moral equality of citizens. In this episode, Walker Haskins discusses Wawrzyniec Goślicki’s The Accomplished Senator.
In the late sixteenth century, Wawrzyniec Goślicki authored De Optimo Senatore (The Accomplished Senator), a bold argument for a politics grounded in natural law, civic virtue, and the constitutional liberties of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Joined by Walker Haskins, our editor for intellectual history, Paul Meany, covers Goślicki’s career as a bishop, diplomat, and political theorist. They discuss Goślicki’s vision of checks on executive power and his rejection of arbitrary rule.
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Walker Haskins is a consultant with AIER’s visiting research fellowship program and was previously a program assistant at AIER. Walker is presently pursuing graduate coursework in social science research. He holds a BSc in political science from the University of Amsterdam where he graduated with Interdisciplinary (IIS) honours and an extended honours thesis. He was a 2022–2023 Don Lavoie Fellow with the Mercatus Center and received a Calihan Grant to pursue research on the origins of political liberty in Eastern Europe from the Acton Institute.