The aim of the present volume is to discuss the notion of constitution from the perspectives of history of political thought. Its scholarly intention is to go beyond the approach concentrating on the formal understanding of constitution and bring forward more complex historical and philosophic-political interpretations. Our point of departure was the need to revive the somehow neglected distinction between the idea of constitution as an act of conscious law-giving activity and the notion of constitution conceived as the set of fundamental political rules derived from the very nature of political regime and its historical development.

When in the summer of 1920, the Red Army invaded newly independent Poland hoping to use it as a base for carrying out communist revolutions in the West, it met with unexpected resistance not only from the propertied class, but also from peasants and workers. The Poles had a remarkably clear understanding of communism's implications for freedom and human rights. Contributors to Polish Perspectives on Communism accurately grasped, decades before it was actually tried, what communism would mean in practice. These authors-some writing in the mid-1800s-understood the consequences of abolishing property, as preached by the communists, and of their rejection of religion and the rule of law. They anticipated the gruesome features of Leninism-Stalinism long before the collapse of the Soviet Union opened the eyes of its Western admirers. The authors in this anthology dispel the illusion that if communism failed in Russia it was due to an accident of history, having been tried in the wrong country and implemented by incompetent leaders. The evidence presented here should demonstrate that its failure was not only inevitable, but also anticipated long before it occurred.