Sieyès and republican liberty

Adam Lindsay

doi:10.1177/1474885120980591

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Neo-republicans associate liberty with non-domination (Pettit 1997; Skinner 1998).1 For Philip Pettit, domination arises when one party has the capacity to interfere on an arbitrary basis, and with impunity, with the choices of another (Pettit 1997:22)
Pettit’s history of republicanism has inevitably found itself a target for criticism (McCormick 2003; Nelson 2004; Ghosh 2008). This paper extends this perspective through a reading of the republicanism of Emmanuel Sieyès, who further unsettles Pettit’s dualist history of republicanism
In what remains of this paper, I argue that this diverges in a fine but significant way from Pettit’s formulation of republicanism: while Pettit appreciates the importance of trust and mutual dependence to public life, he relies on a mechanism of public responsiveness in order to keep this in check

Summary

Introduction

Neo-republicans associate liberty with non-domination (Pettit 1997; Skinner 1998).1 For Philip Pettit, domination arises when one party has the capacity to interfere on an arbitrary basis, and with impunity, with the choices of another (Pettit 1997:22). Pace Pettit, I argue that under Sieyès’s presentation of liberty, constituent power is not to be understood as a vigilant check upon a dominating legislature, but rather as means of disentangling citizens from the civic process.

Results

Conclusion