The Concept of “State” in Lithuania: Origins and Development of the Modern Lithuanian Political Thought

This dissertation seeks to reconstruct the development of the modern Lithuanian political thought. The main object of the analysis for achieving this goal is the concept of the state (Lith. valstybė). It serves as a synthetic concept and helps to interpret the utterances of the important Lithuanian intellectuals about the person, society and polity as such from the standpoint of political theory. Analysis is done by combining three schools of intellectual history: history of ideas, conceptual history and history of the political. The dissertation shows that the genesis of the concept of the state since the beginning of the 19th century and its embedding in the modern political language and thought cannnot be separated from the development of a modern political paradigm. The national awakening at the end of the 19th century also led to the creation of new political concepts, which helped to define the polity as an abstract and sovereign entity. The ideologization of the concept (different usage of it in order to provide the basis for competing ideological projects) enables to distinguish several different attitudes towards the state specific for the Lithuanian political culture. During the Interbellum period it is possible to indicate four main modes to conceptualize the state: organic, nationalistic, democratic-legalistic and Marxist-economistic. After the Second World War Marxist and legalistic conceptualization of the state became the dominant ones in Lithuania, and the Lithuanian exile developed organic and liberal concepts of state