Sieyès and republican liberty

Lindsay, Adam

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.

Citation

Lindsay, A. (2022). Sieyès and republican liberty. European Journal of Political Theory, 21(1), 155-177. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885120980591

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 24, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Dec 22, 2020
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2022
• Deposit Date: Dec 2, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 22, 2020
• Journal: European Journal of Political Theory
• Print ISSN: 1474-8851
• Electronic ISSN: 1741-2730
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 21
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 155-177
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885120980591
• Keywords: Liberty; domination; dependency; representation; republicanism; constituent power
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5095387
• Publisher URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1474885120980591