The Abbé Sieyès and the Social Contract: the Nation behind the Polity

Abstract

To ask the question of the Third Estate is equivalent to asking, what is society, or to use a language more appropriate to the period, what is the nation? As the pamphlet proceeds, it will become obvious that the answer to the original question is given by the equivalence: the Third Estate is everything because it is the nation, because it is society. This may cause one to wonder about the status of the first two estates. In particular, one might wonder if formerly, when the Third Estate was nothing, the first two estates were everything. The response, however, is a clear no. Their apparent superiority masked an almost ontological inferiority. At no time could they be identified with the nation; on the contrary, they hindered the nation’s self-realization. What then is the source of this hierarchy, these different registers? The text points to a distinction between ‘travaux particuliers’ and ‘fonctions publiques’. The former, it is claimed, are indispensable, for they form the ‘base’ of society, the substance out of which it is composed; the latter are secondary, having been constituted by the base to serve the maintenance and development of its various ‘labours’. Consequently, those involved in the travaux particuliers — in principle, the Third Estate² — are those to be most closely identified with the reality of social being. But the Third Estate is not