The edition contains all of Sieyès's "Essential Political Writings" during the revolutionary decade (1789-1799), among them his famous pamphlet What is the Third Estate? as well as the less well known, but no less important later Thermidor speeches.

Previous ed. published as Bd. 43 of series: Politica, Abhandlungen und Texte zur politischen Wissenschaft.

Moderation and liberalism are different and in some cases antagonistic concepts. In recent years, the view that Sieyès’s idea of constituent power is a moderate and liberal rendering of sovereignty has gained acceptance in intellectual history and constitutional theory literature. This claim is based on the premise that radical and illiberal readers of Rousseau’s idea of sovereignty, such as Robespierre and the Jacobins, were opposed to representing the general will (volonté générale). Thus, constituent power as the exercise of power (...) by extraordinary representatives to draft a constitution would be a liberal attempt at political moderation in the French revolution. In contrast to this liberal reading, my analysis shows that Sieyès’s idea of constituent power is an illiberal attempt at political moderation. Against moderate liberal theories, constituent power demands that the extraordinary representatives of the constituent assembly must will, deliberate, and act as if they were the people themselves. These representatives have absolute powers and the mandate to create a constitution but also the imperative to perceive and mirror the sovereign will. From a political theory approach, I conclude that constituent power is not a liberal idea but a key notion of moderate illiberalism that prevailed during the French Revolution. (shrink)

In On the People’s Terms, Philip Pettit incorporates the Sieyèsian notion of constituent power into his constitutional theory of non-domination. In this article, I argue that Emmanuel Sieyès’s understanding of liberty precludes such an appropriation. While a republican, his conceptualisation of liberty in the face of commercial society stood apart from theories of civic vigilance, preferring instead to disentangle individuals from politics and maximise what he understood to be their non-political freedoms. Sieyès saw that liberty was heightened through (...) relations of representation and commercial dependency. This conception of liberty was pivotal to the identity of the nation, and so allowed Sieyès to assess forms of collective injustice committed by the French nobility. It also provided the normative foundation of his theory of constituent power. For Sieyès, constituent power guarded against legislative excess in a decidedly minimal sense, intending instead to separate citizens from the political sphere so they were not burdened with ongoing participation or public vigilance. (shrink)

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’s 1795 proposal for a Constitutional Jury is usually portrayed as the first proposal for an institution to control the constitutionality of laws, and thus the ancestor of the modern constitutional court. Challenging this view, this article resituates the Constitutional Jury in a broader transatlantic tradition concerned with creating a conservative power, a non-judicial and explicitly political constitutional guardian, and demonstrates the influence of the 1776 Pennsylvania Council of Censors on Sieyès’s Constitutional Jury. Drawing upon the insights (...) provided by this tradition, it then reevaluates the history of constitutionalism and the contemporary crisis of constitutional guardianship. (shrink)

Work occupies a central place in most people’s lives, yet a secondary one in most of political philosophy. This article attempts to show the negative theoretical consequences of this neglect by taking the example of the concept of constituent power as it appears in the writings of Emmanuel Joseph Sièyes and Karl Marx. Both authors conceived it as made up of the working classes. This, however, makes them both run into the same paradox: how to politically represent a class that (...) is characterised by a non-political activity – work? I argue that neither of them gives a satisfactory response since both rely on an implausible account of objective class interests based on fragile grounds. I conclude by showing that the political representation of workers is a theoretical and practical problem that the concept of constituent power is unable to resolve. (shrink)

The abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes distinguished himself as the chief theoretician of the French Revolution--and as a revolutionary constitutional and social theorist in his own right--through his rigorously analytical theory of representative government and its corollary, the representative character of social life in general. He expressed the essence of his thought in a series of three pamphlets published in the months leading up to the meeting of the Estates-General in 1789. This volume presents all three essays--_Views of the Executive Means_, (...) _An Essay on Privileges_, and _What Is the Third Estate?_--in their entirety. The third essay, in a new translation by Michael Sonenscher, is followed by Sieyes's 1791 newspaper debate with Tom Paine on the merits of monarchy versus republicanism. Elucidated by Sonenscher's insightful Introduction, these texts will fascinate anyone interested in the history of the French Revolution, the history of social and political thought, or the origins and character of modern liberalism. (shrink)

The Abbé Sieyès is usually portrayed as a thoroughly modern thinker and a critic of the nostalgic Classical Republicanism of some of his contemporaries, in favour of a “modern republicanism”, founded upon the division of labour and commercial sociability in a nation composed of equal labourers and producers. But Sieyès’s unpublished manuscripts suggest he, in fact, regarded modern labourers as unskilled “Machines du Travail”, dulled by work and incapable of exercising the duties of citizenship, a critique grounded in (...) a critical account of commercial society as compared to the ideal republican polity. Where most scholars regard this as either a simple contradiction or a passing juvenile nostalgia, this paper argues that, influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sieyès consistently sought to counteract the degrading effects of the inequalities generated by commercial society and the division of labour. It was on this basis that Sieyès sought to construct a new political system which would reconcile participatory politics with representative government, enabling all citizens to enjoy a life of Active Citizenship. Based on these insights, this paper reinterprets Sieyès’s political project as an attempt to reconcile the classical conception of citizenship with the demands of a commercial society. (shrink)

Although Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès remains amongst the most studied thinkers of the French Revolution, his views on international politics remain largely unexplored, despite his significant role in shaping the foreign policy of the French republic after 1794. This article provides a new account of Sieyès as an international political thinker and actor, drawing on published and archival materials to reconstruct Sieyès' diplomatic programme and its intellectual roots. In so doing, it challenges both the notion that Sieyès was (...) a committed practitioner of an unideological realopolitik and the common assertion that Sieyès was a follower of Immanuel Kant's famous project for perpetual peace. Instead, this article shows that Sieyès charted a distinct course, based on a plan for the ‘republicanisation’ of Europe and its reorganisation into a league of militarily and economically linked states under French hegemony, oriented towards the preservation of republicanism in a hostile world. On this basis it re-evaluates the relationship between Sieyès' and Kant's conceptions of a confederation of republican states, presenting a new account of Kant's Perpetual Peace as a curtailment of his earlier cosmopolitan and pacifist idealism in response to the international situation of the 1790s and the foreign policy pursued by Sieyès and his allies. (shrink)

Even though he is mainly known for his concept of constituent power, Sieyès was one of the first constitutional theorists to ask for a guardian of the constitution which closely resembles contemporary constitutional courts. This article reconstructs the main tenets of his proposal, puts them in the larger context of his constitutional theory and then assesses the constitutional nature and functions of this institution. The judgment is mixed: as an organ, Sieyès’ constitutional jury is a hybrid institution, neither (...) a real third chamber nor a full-fledged constitutional court; however, its functions not only are a clear anticipation of the control of constitutionality, but are also intended to tame constituent power and to protect the rights of man in case of legal gaps. (shrink)

Cultural history's recent treatments of Sieyès’ political theory have understood his political writings in their convergences with and divergences from Rousseau's political theory. By sketching a thoroughgoing analogy between the ecclesiological arguments in Malebranche's Entretiens sur la Métaphysique et sur la Religion (1688) and the arguments that Sieyès offers on the floor of the National Assembly concerning the nature of representation, I suggest that we should recontextualize Sieyès’ speeches vis-à-vis the broader discourse of the ‘general will,’ which (...) was theological at its root. That is, the arguments Sieyès offers for the sovereignty of the National Assembly, separately and in combination, appear to have been shaped by a malebranchiste ecclesiology that grew out of the particular context of the Jansenist challenge to the Church. This argument has ramifications not just for our understanding of Sieyès and revolutionary political theory but also for what have been called the “religious origins of the French Revolution.” ☆ I am grateful to Bill Sewell, Dale Van Kley, Michael Sonenscher, Chris Brooke, and Sam James, for their careful readings and insightful comments at various stages of this project. More generally, I am thankful for the thoughts of the participants of the Cambridge conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History (March 2010). Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewers of History of European Ideas for their comments. (shrink)

La Philosophie Française, sans guillemets, ça n'existe pas. Le présent ouvrage tente d'élucider les conditions dans lesquelles, dans la période post-révolutionnaire, l'investigation philosophique, directement investie dans les transformations de la société, a revêtu les formes singulières qui ont conduit à l'identifier comme "française". Ce phénomène complexe est examiné à partir d'exemples empruntés aux principaux courants de pensée qui, de la Première République (Sieyès) à la Troisième (Barni), ont alimenté le débat d'idées au cours du XIXe siècle, à savoir le (...) conservatisme (Bonald, Maistre, Chateaubriand), le rationalisme (les Idéologues, Cousin, Renan) et le socialisme (l'école saint-simonienne, Proudhon). Mais en réfléchissant à la constitution de ces trois idéologies, on en vient à interroger la constitution du concept même d'"idéologie". Et ce qui se découvre ainsi, c'est notre histoire, celle dont nous sommes d'autant plus tributaires que nous l'ignorons. (shrink)

Die politische Ideengeschichte kennt nicht viele Autoren, die derart umstritten sind, wie der Abbé Sieyés: Für manche Interpreten ist er Wegbereiter des Jakobiner-Terrors, für andere dagegen der Vater des parlamentarischen Regierungssystems unserer Zeit. Der vorliegende Band unterzieht diese und ähnliche Klischees einer kritischen Prüfung.

A hipótese do artigo é que o dilema da constituição da representação política, que não tem por função refletir, mas interferir e operar uma unidade de “vontade política” a um povo ou uma nação, foi enfrentado pelos primeiros pensadores da representação moderna em diferentes contextos de grande transformação política e social: na Inglaterra absolutista no século XVII, por Thomas Hobbes, e na França pós-revolucionaria no século XVIII, pelo Abade Sieyès. O artigo procura identificar nos argumentos dos respectivos filósofos os (...) primeiros esforços teóricos sobre a representação moderna, através de uma comparação que evidencia dilemas e constrangimentos semelhantes em diferentes contextos teóricos. Um dos principais desafios da representação política, nos dois autores, permanece sendo a busca dos mecanismos capazes de transformar vontades dispersas e múltiplas de indivíduos numa só vontade unificada do corpo social. Embora os argumentos de legitimidade possam variar, para ambos os autores, a “vontade” do representante político é produto de uma elaboração conceitual e de uma produção racional que se dá com a constituição de um corpo, que no caso de Hobbes se dá com a criação do Estado, e em Sieyès com a representação nacional. (shrink)

Historians and political theorists have long been interested in how the principle of people’s power was conceptualised during the French Revolution. Traditionally, two diverging accounts emerge, one of national and the other of popular sovereignty, the former associated with moderate monarchist deputies, including the Abbé Sieyes, and the latter with the Jacobins. This paper argues against this binary interpretation of the political thought of the French Revolution, in favour of a third account of people’s power, Sieyes’ idea of pouvoir constituant. (...) Traditionally, constituent power has been viewed as a variation of sovereignty, but I show it to be an independent conceptualisation of people’s power. Sieyes’ political theory led him to criticise and refuse contemporary theories of sovereignty in favour of what he understood as a fully modern account of people’s power. Based on extensive research in the archives, I show how Sieyes opposed the deployment of sovereignty by the revolutionary Assemblies and reco... (shrink)

DIREITO E HISTÓRIA NA FRANÇA PÓS-REVOLUCIONÁRIA: CONSIDERAÇÕES A RESPEITO DA CONTRIBUIÇÃO DE EMMANUEL SIEYÈS PARA O CONSTITUCIONALISMO MODERNO.

István Hont identified a point in the history of political thought at which republicanism and commercialism became separated. According to Hont, Emmanuel Sieyès proposed that a monarchical republic should be formed. By contrast the Jacobins, in favour of a republic led by the people, rejected not only Sieyès’s political proposal, but also the economic ideology that went with it. Sieyès was in favour of a commercial republic; the Jacobins were not. This was, according to Hont, a defining (...) moment in the history of political thought. In this article, I offer a different analysis of that particular moment in the history of the commercial republic, one that instead of focusing on Sieyès and the Jacobins, looks at the thought of Girondins philosophers Nicolas de Condorcet and Sophie de Grouchy. I argue that their arguments provide sound models for a commercial republic, reconciling late 18th century republican ideals in which virtue was central, with the need for a flourishing and internationally active market economy. (shrink)

It is usually held that representative government is not strictly democratic, since it does not allow the people themselves to directly make decisions. But here, taking as her guide Thomas Paine’s subversive view that “Athens, by representation, would have surpassed her own democracy,” Nadia Urbinati challenges this accepted wisdom, arguing that political representation deserves to be regarded as a fully legitimate mode of democratic decision making—and not just a pragmatic second choice when direct democracy is not possible. As Urbinati shows, (...) the idea that representation is incompatible with democracy stems from our modern concept of sovereignty, which identifies politics with a decision maker’s direct physical presence and the immediate act of the will. She goes on to contend that a democratic theory of representation can and should go beyond these identifications. Political representation, she demonstrates, is ultimately grounded in a continuum of influence and power created by political judgment, as well as the way presence through ideas and speech links society with representative institutions. Deftly integrating the ideas of such thinkers as Rousseau, Kant, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Paine, and the Marquis de Condorcet with her own, Urbinati constructs a thought-provoking alternative vision of democracy. (shrink)

This paper suggests that by illustrating the importance of the concept of representation to his thought, the better known theories of the state and the constitution to be found in Schmitt's work are more easily comprehensible. Furthermore, the paper argues that Schmitt's thoughts on these subjects develop from an early and "personalist" account of representation, towards a more mainstream constitutional theory, through an interpretation of the writings of the Abbé Sieyes in particular.

That the Enlightenment shaped modernity is uncontested. Yet remarkably few historians or philosophers have attempted to trace the process of ideas from the political and social turmoil of the late eighteenth century to the present day. This is precisely what Jonathan Israel now does. In Democratic Enlightenment , Israel demonstrates that the Enlightenment was an essentially revolutionary process, driven by philosophical debate. The American Revolution and its concerns certainly acted as a major factor in the intellectual ferment that shaped the (...) wider upheaval that followed, but the radical philosophes were no less critical than enthusiastic about the American model. From 1789, the General Revolution's impetus came from a small group of philosophe-revolutionnaires , men such as Mirabeau, Sieyes, Condorcet, Volney, Roederer, and Brissot. Not aligned to any of the social groups represented in the French National assembly, they nonetheless forged " la philosophie moderne "--in effect Radical Enlightenment ideas--into a world-transforming ideology that had a lasting impact in Latin America, Canada and eastern Europe as well as France, Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. In addition, Israel argues that while all French revolutionary journals powerfully affirmed that la philosophie moderne was the main cause of the French Revolution, the main stream of historical thought has failed to grasp what this implies. Israel sets the record straight, demonstrating the true nature of the engine that drove the Revolution, and the intimate links between the radical wing of the Enlightenment and the anti-Robespierriste "Revolution of reason." Acclaim for earlier volumes in the trilogy: "His vast--and vastly impressive--book sets out to redefine the intellectual landscape of early modern Europe. Magnificent and magisterialwill undoubtedly be one of the truly great historical works of the decade." -- Sunday Telegraph "The scholarship is breathtaking. Israel has read everything, absorbed every nuance, followed up every byway." -- New Statesman "An enormously impressive piece of scholarship. The breadth and depth of the author's reading are breathtaking and Enlightenment Contested is set to become the definitive work for philosophers as well as historians on this extraordinary period." -- Tribune. (shrink)

SUMMARYThe essay argues that Jeremy Bentham played a major role in the transitional process between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries leading to the ‘discovery' or ‘invention of society' as an order, i.e., as an autonomous object of knowledge. By comparing Bentham's discourse with those developed by select protagonists of that transition, particularly Ferguson, Sieyès, and Mirabeau, it is shown how society emerges as the logical and historical space of a set of relationships that affects both the rationalisation and (...) the practice of government. In contrast with Michel Foucault's interpretation of Bentham's role in the genealogy of neoliberalism, recently developed by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, this paper suggests that ‘the new governmental reason’ rose from within the discourse of law. Consequently, the problem of ‘constitution’ was not left behind by the epistemological change of the eighteenth century, as they argue. Rather, the scientific and political understanding of society as a code became the base for an innovative conception of both law and politics. (shrink)

Many scholars claim that Abbé Sieyès (1748–1836) was the first to deploy the concept of a pouvoir constituant (constituent power) as the power that establishes a constitutional order under which the ordinary powers of government are conferred. Others find the substance of the theory to have been articulated by earlier figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whilst conceding that the terminology of pouvoir constituant was not used until Sieyès. What no one has observed until now is that the Scottish (...) Presbyterian divine, Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661), can lay claim to being the first to explicitly use the language of constituent power and to develop a theory of the grounds of constitutional government expressly in those terms. Rutherford argues that “the constituent is above that which is constituted,” and thus draws a clear distinction between constituent and constituted power. Furthermore, he vests the former ultimately in the people while the King possesses only constituted power. Rutherford presented a theory of constituent power that had all the essential elements of the theory of pouvour constituant we find in Sieyès, albeit a theory embedded in a political and intellectual context as different from that of Sieyès as his is from our own. (shrink)

Introducción.--La filosofía moderna; Francisco Bacon. Renato Descartes.--El liberalismo europeo: Juan Locke. Juan Jacobo Rousseau.--La estructura del estado moderno: Montesquieu. Manuel José Sieyés.--El ataque a la tradición: Voltaire. Diderot.--Progreso y Utopía: Adán Smith.

La Représentation est originairement une technique de droit privé dont déjà Cicéron donnait la définition: Unus sustineo tres persona, mei, adversarii et judicis. Dans la politique moderne, l'institution de la représentation en droit public porte, dit-on généralement, la marque de l'idéologie des hommes de 1789 et la Constitution de 1791, en son titre III, détermine le contenu juridique du régime représentatif en alliant au principe individualiste dont Siéyès et Mirabeau avaient été les porte-parole une conception organique de la nation que (...) traduit l'idée de l'indivisibilité de la souveraineté nationale. En conséquence, dans le régime représentatif moderne, les députés représentent la nation entière, ce qui entraîne l'indépendance des élus par rapport aux électeurs. (shrink)

In contrast to the juxtaposition of representative democracy and Confucian meritocracy that is currently being discussed in international political theory, we start from the hypothesis of a historical, intercultural and logical, simultaneous provenance of democracy and meritocracy in the evolution of the modern constitutional state. To this end, we examine the reception of Confucianism in the republican history of ideas of European Enlightenment using selected examples ranging from Leibniz to the classical constitutional and government theory of Sieyès. The widespread (...) ignorance of the Confucian elements in the classical core of modern republicanism that we have evaluated here is attributed to the needs of political legitimacy and the methodical ahistorism and historical amnesia of academic discourse. (shrink)

V prvem delu razprave je precizirano, kdaj, kje in kako se je v francoski revoluciji uveljavila delitev na levico in desnico. Levica je definirana z delitvijo političnega prostora v nasprotni in izključujoči se entiteti, med katerima ni posredovanj. V drugem delu razprave je oblikovanje take delitve političnega prostora ponazorjeno z intervencijami Robespierra in Saint-Justa, Sieyé-sa ter Marxa in Engelsa. V sklepnem delu je delitev na levico in desnico interpretirana kot vzpostavitev nadzorovanja političnega prostora. Pozicija levice nima avtonomne identitete, predpostavlja fiksno (...) referenčno točko in implicira zunanjega opazovalca. Strukturno vsebuje pogoj možnosti za izrinjenje vesti z zavestjo in ločitev politike od morale. (shrink)

This essay goes beyond the dominant conception of constituent power developed by Emmanuel Sieyès and Carl Schmitt by excavating an alternative through the practices of twentieth-century workers’ councils and the interpretations of council democracy by Cornelius Castoriadis and Hannah Arendt. Interpreters of the constituent power often agree on its fundamentally antagonistic relation to constituted power, hereby making constituent politics a momentary experience, which cannot be sustained in constituted politics. Council democracy, instead, discloses a modality of politics, which bridges the (...) gap between constituent power and political form in order to provide institutional means through which the spirit of revolution can survive the founding moment. With this alternative concept of council democratic constituent power, this essay contributes to radical democratic theory by stipulating ways in which institutions can be rethought radically democratic as a way in which constituent power (creativity, novelty, freedom) can be institutionally approximated and continually reexperienced. (shrink)

Constituent power is a key concept in democratic theory and constitutional law. The French term pouvoir constituant was coined by Sieyès in the context of the French Revolution in his famous pamphl...

A partir del concepto de soberanía formulado por Bodino surgió la idea de la sustitución de la soberanía del monarca por soberanía de la nación que formuló Sieyès. El concepto de nación unido a la soberanía lo alteró Fichte, para quien la nación era previa al logro de la constitución de un Estado. Desde entonces, el nacionalismo, a partir de la construcción de una “identidad”, ha utilizado la palabra nación como lo hizo Fichte y se han propuesto definiciones de (...) dicha palabra que han oscurecido el concepto, a pesar de que para la ONU y el Derecho Internacional es claro, la nación requiere población, territorio y Estado soberano. El artículo trata también de los tipos de Estado y, finalmente, analiza brevemente el actual panorama de los estudios sobre el nacionalismo, no por su interés filosófico-jurídico, pues en realidad vive de sus propios mitos, sino por ser “la más destructiva fuerza de nuestro tiempo”, en frase de I. Berlin, por lo que hay que entenderlo para evitar sus efectos nocivos en el pensamiento y en la vida política. (shrink)

This article offers an alternative reading of the Abbé Sieyès and the modern ‘nation-state’ problématique. I argue that the subject/object that is constituted in the early days of modernity is the incomplete society: an impossible-possibility ideal of congruency of population, authority and space. I suggest reading this ideal of congruency as a fantasy in that it offers a certain ‘fullness to come’, the promise of jouissance that can never be attained and is thus constantly re-envisioned and reinvoked. Drawing on (...) discourse-analytical and psychoanalytical tools I explain the logic of fantasy before analysing Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate?, as I show how he critiques and fragments the old model of the state and how his reading of the nation is fantasmatic, a continuous project towards impossible congruency. (shrink)

This article examines the excitement that Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments generated in France during the French Revolution, focusing particularly on the writings of political theorists, participants and commentators such as the abbé Sieyès, Pierre-Louis Rœderer, the Marquis de Condorcet and Sophie de Grouchy Condorcet, who were dismayed at their political opponents’ use of Rousseau, and looked to Smith for an understanding of the passions that was compatible with democratic sovereignty and representative government. In the political context of (...) the early 1790s, clarifying the concept of natural sociability, which Rousseau had rejected, but Smith and Helvétius, in different ways, each regarded as indispensible to a society dependent on advanced division of labour, became a central concern in the public lectures delivered by Pierre-Louis Rœderer as the Terror took hold. ☆ My thanks to Emma Rothschild, Michael Sonenscher, Brian Young and other participants in the History of Political Thought Seminar, Oxford, and The Hexagonal Forum, Cambridge, where earlier versions of this paper were presented and helpfully discussed. I’m also grateful for comments on an earlier draft from Carolina Armenteros, Clare Jackson, Duncan Kelly, Michael Sonenscher and Richard Whatmore. (shrink)

Spanning a critical period--from the turbulent era of the American and French Revolutions through to the calmer waters of the nineteenth centuries, this book will help all students of political ideas to gain a fuller appreciation of the great works which form the foundation of the subject. Seven classic texts have been chosen for analysis: Hamilton's The Federalist, Sieyes' What is the Third Estate?, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Hegel's The Philosophy of Right, de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, (...) Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, and Mill's On Liberty. Together they illustrate and express the main themes of the period. The most prominent of these is the growing distinction between the state and society and the problems that this brings in its train. Other themes embrace the interplay of revolution and reaction, the growth of representative government, and the challenge posed by democracy. The clear analysis and explanation contained in each essay will enable the reader to return to the original texts with a new understanding and insight. (shrink)