Power and Constitution: Civil vs Political Society

Abstract

Let us return briefly to the three stage history posited by Sieyès in his description of the development of the nation state. The first stage, it will be remembered, involved isolated individuals who wished to unite; in the second stage they united and formed a common will; in the third stage this common will was detached from the ‘tout voulant et agissant’ formed by the second state.¹ There is nothing out of the ordinary here, but a few pages later we are told that what we had thought described the establishment of a social contract, portrayed in fact the establishment of a purely political contract. ‘We have seen’, Sieyès writes, ‘how the constitution had its origin in the second period. Clearly this constitution relates only to the government.’² This is far from clear: Sieyès’ history is that of the social contract in its most typical form; furthermore, in the second stage government does not exist, at least not as an apparatus distinct from society, separating the governing from the governed. One might, of course, claim that we are just quibbling: what difference does it make whether Sieyès refers to the constitution as a political or a social contract? And yet from what he writes elsewhere it is clear that he himself wishes to preserve the distinction between a principle of social union, complete with a national will, and a principle of political union, even as the former, lacking a clear place in his three-stage history, seems to recede into pre-history.