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Brief Lives

Pylyp Orlyk (1672-1742)

Hilarius Bogbinder tells us about an innovative Ukrainian philosopher, democratic theorist and campaigner against tyranny.

Chances are that you have never heard of Pylyp Orlyk (1672-1742), or perhaps any other Ukrainian philosopher for that matter – Gregory Skovoroda (1722-1794), perhaps? Anyway, you should have; for Orlyk, a Cossack politician, was the first to establish a democratic standard for the separation of the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches of government. If you’re American, you may be familiar with James Madison’s conclusion in Federalist Paper 51 (1787), that “The structure of the Government must furnish the proper checks and balances between the different departments”; and if you’re European you might have read Charles Montesquieu’s famous dictum from The Spirit of the Laws (1748) that “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.” These deep and insightful arguments made a lasting contribution to political and legal philosophy. But they were not original. They were first pioneered not in Paris or in Philadelphia, but in Poland by exiled thinker and politician Pylyp Stepanovych Orlyk.

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