Sieyès and republican liberty

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.


Introduction
Neo-republicans associate liberty with non-domination 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). In his most recent work on the subject, On the People's Terms, Pettit has sought to account for the democratic institutions associated with this understanding of liberty. Here, he identifies republican liberty with the Siey esian notion of constituent power (Pettit, 2012: 285-292). In this article, I argue that Siey es's understanding of liberty precludes a straightforward incorporation of constituent power into a constitutional theory of non-domination. While a republican, Siey es was an idiosyncratic one; his conceptualisation of liberty in the face of commercial society stood apart from theories of civic vigilance, and he preferred instead to disentangle individuals from politics and maximise what he took to be their non-political freedoms.
Pettit's republican constitutionalism, while analytical in scope, is grounded in and enriched by a highly stylised historical excavation of republicanism (Pettit, 1997: 17-51;2012: 5-25;). 2 Pettit celebrates what he labels the Italian-Atlantic tradition, inherited from classical Rome, which emphasised the freedom from the domination of a master. Rediscovered in Renaissance Italy, it sparked the English Civil War and enflamed the American Revolution (Pettit, 2012: 2). Liberty was secured through the constitutional constraints of the mixed constitution, and an understanding of civic virtue to vigilantly track public policy. Pettit contrasts the Italian-Atlantic tradition with a 'continental' variant of republicanism rooted in the Rousseauvian transformations of the 18th century. While this 'continental' tradition maintained the ideal of non-domination, it did so by abandoning the mixed constitution in favour of a popular absolutism through which the free person was equated with a politically active participant (Pettit, 2012: 18;). Pettit's history of republicanism has inevitably found itself a target for criticism (Ghosh, 2008;McCormick, 2003;Nelson, 2004). This article extends this perspective through a reading of the republicanism of Emmanuel Siey es, who further unsettles Pettit's dualist history of republicanism.
It does so by excavating Siey es's own formulation of republican liberty. After situating Pettit's interpretation of Siey es within the existing scholarship, I argue that Siey es developed an account of liberty that sought to challenge a brand of aristocratic French republicanism indebted to the English Commonwealth tradition. The th ese nobiliaire entrenched the power and status of the nobility under the guise of protection against monarchical absolutism. Against this, Siey es developed an argument for liberty that celebrated the dependency generated by commercial society. His proposal hung on a distinction between liberty of independence and liberty of empowerment. This provided a normative justification for the commercial division of labour and for a practice of social representation, and sought to sharpen the benefits one received when dependent on others. This interpretation is developed in the second section. In the third section, I show how Siey es's presentation of liberty patterned his revolutionary constitutional theory, notably, the normative ordering of the nation. Here, Siey es identified a set of interactions between the symbiotic dependency within the Third Estate, the parasitic dependency of the noble order on the nation and the feudal domination of the noble order over the rural peasantry. While guarding against the most pernicious forms of domination enacted by the remnants of feudalism, Siey es prioritised the gains to liberty produced by commercial society, improving the efficiency, quality and choice presented to individuals. These distinctions provided one set of normative foundations of his version of republican constitutionalism.
In the final section, I argue that this contrasts in a critical way with Pettit's republican constitutionalism. While Pettit (1997: 262-270) does recognise the importance of trust and mutual dependence to public life, he differs from Siey es with respect to the normative ordering of dependence within their respective conceptions of liberty. This had political implications: the centrality that Siey es ascribes to liberty of empowerment alters the grounds on which political representation is operationalised, tempering the mechanism of public responsiveness that is key to Pettit's vigilant tracking of trust. If constituent power was to guard against legislative excess, it did so in a decidedly minimal sense: for Siey es, representation and constituent power were each mechanisms to separate citizens from the political sphere so they were not burdened with ongoing participation or public vigilance. This should be seen as a problem for any attempt to incorporate Siey es into a constitutionalism of non-domination.

Siey es and Republican liberty
The place of liberty in the constitutional thought of the Abb e Siey es is routinely marginalised. This is, in part, because much effort has been invested in tracing the intellectual ancestry of his contributions to the theory of sovereignty, often with the broader aim of identifying the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. This can be seen in the resurgence of Siey es among interwar legal theorists, namely Raymond Carr e de Malberg (1922) and Carl Schmitt (2008) for whom the Siey esian nation took on the gloss of a Rousseauvian general will. Hannah Arendt, too, succumbed to this reading when, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt, 1967: 231), she associated the constituent power of the nation with a 'pseudomystical aura of lawless arbitrariness' that eroded the freedom of the people. For these interpreters, constituent power was understood to be interchangeable with unbridled popular sovereignty and for Arendt the Terror was evidence of this interpretation. 3 This presentation of Siey es has come under scrutiny by those who have emphasised the centrality of representation to Siey es's constitutional theory (Baczko, 1988;Baker, 1990;Forsyth, 1987;Sonenscher, 2003). Istvan Hont's pathbreaking work, for instance, proposed that Siey es's debt was to Thomas Hobbes, whose notion of union through artificial representation stood behind the Siey esian nation, laying the foundations for the modern state form (Hont, 2005: 486). Hont's intervention appropriately restored individual liberty to Siey esian constitutionalism against the impositions of an exaggerated decisionism. Others have emphasised the liberal constitutionalism that followed from this, whereby the representative form of the constituent power served as a limit upon the authority of the constituted powers, thereby guaranteeing the rights of man. This stance remains common within the French literature where his distinctiveness from Rousseau has been long argued (Clavreul, 1987;Faur e, 2008;Guilhaumou, 1997: 18-23;Pasquino, 1998;Tyrsenko, 2000: 29-31). 4 However, while the importance of individual liberty is recognised, its composition is left undertheorised. It is a mistake to envisage Siey es's understanding of liberty as something secondary to his styling of the nation. I argue that the two are profoundly connected, and that his reworking of republican liberty provides the normative anchor to his constitutionalism and his account of representation. This is not to argue that his conception of liberty has been neglected wholesale. However, those that have elaborated his conception of liberty have subsumed him into orthodox republicanism, or early liberalism. Egon Zweig, now over a century ago, argued that his account of freedom was the key to understanding the anti-Rousseauvian dimension of Siey es's thought. Zweig emphasised Siey es's authorship of the D eclaration, presenting citizens as rights bearers for whom freedom met its limits only upon harming the freedom of others (Zweig, 1909: 127). 5 This presentation collapses Siey es into negative liberty in the Berlinian form of non-interference. Elsewhere, Pasquale Pasquino has alluded to the Siey esian roots of Benjamin Constant's distinction between ancient and modern liberty, contending that the individualism of modern liberty followed from Siey es's representative government (Pasquino, 1987: 214-215; see also Guilhaumou, 1997;Sewell, 1994: 101-102).
If these views emphasise Siey es's liberalism, others present Siey es's understanding of freedom in a more directly republican vein, for while liberty was understood in terms of individual freedom, it took the republican form of non-domination. As Rubinelli (2019a: 52) presents it, non-domination figured in Siey es's constitutional theory as consent to the laws that are made. Rubinelli does appreciate that Siey es's account of liberty is double-faced, consisting also of the freedom granted to individuals through the division of labour. She argues that constituent power was a constitutional device to reconcile this dualist understanding of liberty, in contrast to the dominium of sovereignty. While constituent power took the form of the authority of the people to constitute the state, consistent with the first component of liberty, this was to be executed by extraordinary representatives, consistent with the second component (Rubinelli, 2019a: 53-54). I maintain that these modes of liberty were not complementary and compatible, but conflicting, and this required a trade-off. Siey es subordinated the principle of non-domination to the gains of dependency, and this amends the normative ordering of the nation and shapes the character of Sieyesian republicanism.
This ordering is important: although Pettit's elaboration of Siey es's place as a theorist of republican constitutionalism is brief, with no mention of liberty itself, 6 he presents constituent power as easily reconcilable with the ideal of republican liberty. This entails a 'dual-aspect' model of democracy. In the first, 'constituent' aspect, the people appear as a plurality to determine the metaprinciples to guide lawmaking. In the second, constituted aspect, the people appear as a corporate entity within the bounds set out by the metaprinciples of the constitution. In this way, constituent power appears as a regulative principle to assess from critical distance the internal function of constitutional decision-making. As decisionmaking is guided by the norms devised by a plural constituent power, the authority of the constituted people is therefore non-sovereign, and non-dominating (Pettit, 2012: 290). Pace Pettit, I argue that under Siey es's presentation of liberty, constituent power is not to be understood as a vigilant check upon a dominating legislature, but rather as a means of disentangling citizens from the civic process. Antonio Negri (1999: 218) has argued that this was a fall from grace, transforming a vibrant contestatory republicanism into a 'tortuous combination of representation and government'. However, Siey es did not see the arguments at which he took aim as vibrant or contestatory. Rather, he saw it as a means of entrenching the power and status of the nobility. His matrix of liberty open channels for evaluating instances of collective injustice in this republican tradition.

Siey es on freedom and dependency
It is tempting to assume that Siey es was a 'conventional' theorist of republican liberty. In a note likely written during the Thermidorian Reaction, he wrote, 'no man has the right to dominate another. A free man is he who obeys his own will' (Siey es, 1999c: 474). 7 Such an assumption distorts the political landscape. The vocabulary of republicanism in the late 18th century was both pervasive and deeply variegated (Philp, 1998), a quality that Pettit's stylised opposition does not accommodate. This aspect is also lost among traditionalist accounts of French republicanism, who treat its development in isolation from broader republican currents across Europe (Furet and Ozouf, 1993;Nicolet, 1982). This is true neither of Siey es nor the wider French republican tradition. Siey es read English and had access to an extensive range of works of English Commonwealthmen, including Milton, Harrington, Shaftsbury and Bolingbroke (Forsyth, 1987: 38-40). 8 Moreover, recent work has demonstrated that the English Commonwealth vocabulary permeated France more deeply than was previously assumed (Hammersley, 2010;Jainchill, 2008).
One such example was Henri de Boulainvilliers, with whose work Siey es was well acquainted. 9 His aristocratic republicanism argued for a Frankish liberty, comprising an original condition of being 'perfectly equal and independent, both in general and as an individual', a 'precious liberty' that had been defended against Roman and barbarian invasion, and guarded by the noble order as the only legitimate government of the realm (Boulainvilliers, 1727: 26-27). 10 The ancient form of mixed government stood in contrast to the absolutism that had grown out of Roman rule, and Boulainvilliers called for the restoration of the former. This was the th ese nobiliaire, which adapted arguments from the English Commonwealth tradition to the French context. One likely source of this argument was Lord Bolingbroke, a friend of Boulainvilliers who had championed the vocabulary of English liberty and communicated it through the gothic language of the ancient constitution in the pages of The Craftsman (Hammersley, 2010: 64).
These arguments had been developed in less aristocratic forms by individuals like Gabriel Bonnot de Mably in the mid-18th century, though they retained the appeal to ancient liberties threatened by corrupt magistrates and the emerging commercial society. 11 Mably's Des Droit et Des Devoirs du Citoyen, organised as a dialogue between a Frenchman and an English Commonwealthman, keys us into these arguments. Through the mouthpiece of the Englishman Stanhope, Mably presented a Commonwealthman's analysis of the British constitution coupled with a cautious suggestion for importation to France. For Stanhope, commerce 'infected' society with the vices of its neighbours (Mably, 1972: 9). This replaced civic virtue with private interests, the remedy for which was the vigilant guardianship of ancient liberty against the modern threat of commerce and the court.
Siey es was familiar with these arguments of ancient Frankish liberty, and he dismissed them offhand in What Is the Third Estate? (Siey es, 2003c: 99). Siey es challenged this vocabulary, developing his own idiosyncratic language of republicanism more amenable to commercial society. Rather than being 'infected' by the vices of commercial exchange, or being preserved by an ancient order of nobles, Siey es saw liberty as intimately connected with representation and enhanced by commerce. Identifying how commercial dependency enabled this was vital to a materially inclined assessment of instances of unfreedom.
Siey es saw himself as a sociologist (Guilhaumou, 2006). Liberty was not to be understood in the abstract, but as a manifestation of the material relations of society. These material relations were representative. This was clear even in his notebooks on metaphysics from the early 1770s, where Siey es drew attention to the relation between liberty and representation. A 'representative sensation' was the product of a plurality of sensations within a single sense organ: an image or a melody was a representative sensation. Siey es's proof for one's existence lay in the experience of such representative sensations (Siey es, 1999a: 75). The body was composed of a plurality of organs each of which experience the world differently: one's feet can be cold, while one's head is hot, and these representative sensations were to be mediated into a composite form. The immediate reception of representative sensations was passive, but the examination and deliberation of them by the will was an active endeavour. Individual liberty in its elementary form resided here (Siey es, 1999a: 81). The will was thrown into a relation of representation with the sense organs and was free to decide how it responded.
For Siey es, there was no autonomous will freed from representation. Representation was not antithetical to freedom, despite the proclamations of his contemporaries. 12 Rather, the will's freedom to decide was heightened because of representative relations. The sense organs distilled a plurality of sensations into a more readily interpreted representative sensation upon which the will could make a judgement. The will's capacity to make an effective judgement was aided by the work initially completed by the sense organs, and so to enact one's will was to take advantage of the assemblage of representative connections within the body. Society, for Siey es, was an extension of this logic. Just as the human body consisted of a plurality of organs that aided the freedom of the will, so too was society composed of myriad representative organs that aided individual freedom. This was because as a member of society each individual was exposed to an ever-greater range of representative sensations (Siey es, 1999a: 77-78). In short, one's freedom was enhanced through one's dependence on others in society.
The translation of this corporeal analogy into society was expressed clearest in his essay 'Of the Gains of Liberty in Society and in the Representative System'. He explained that the liberty proper to humans was a liberty within social relations. Those who assumed that liberty was possible in isolation mistook liberty for mere independence. As humans have needs, and as needs have given rise to society, Siey es posited, independence alone was insufficient. Siey es distinguished between two frameworks of liberty in society: liberty of independence, and liberty of empowerment (libert e de pouvoir). Of the former, he considered a man free 'when he is not hindered by other men from exercising his will'. Siey es intended this definition to accord with 'common usage', and this was to be understood in an expansive sense, accommodating both physical and psychological conditions of unfreedom (Siey es, 2014b: 145). More precisely, his definition corresponded to the ancient liberty of Frenchmen expressed in Boulainvilliers's th ese nobiliaire, although whether he had this in mind when writing is unclear: It is hardly possible to list all those many other conditions, internal no less than external, which may render him dependent and even oppressed: I am thinking of the innumerable obstacles that ignorance, clumsiness, rain, wind, fire and so on, may pose for his activity or his tranquility. (Siey es, 2014b: 145) Siey es intended to highlight the insufficiencies of an understanding of liberty as independence. Individuals were inescapably dependent on the external world, and this need not be seen as a hindrance. It was, rather, a form of empowerment. Siey es asked the reader to consider an example: imagine two people caught in a thunderstorm. The first picks up a ladder and uses it to climb into the attic of a barn. The other 'in order to avoid dependency on the ladder, remains outside shivering and exposed in the thunderstorm' (Siey es, 2014b: 150). The former, empowered by the ladder, was able to pursue their will. The latter, in their desire to remain independent, could not.
Siey es thought an asocial definition of liberty was impoverished. 13 Liberty was enhanced by society just as the freedom of the will was enhanced by the sense organs, namely, via his characteristically expansive account of representation. Through the provision of public works, the quality of liberty was improved by augmenting the intellectual and physical powers on the sociable individual (Siey es, 2014a: 122). Siey es understood social representation as a function of the division of labour, which he believed he had diagnosed some years earlier than Adam Smith and had taken considerably further (Sewell, 1994: 89). 14 The division of labour included all aspects of productive society. Specialist labourers, in fulfilling duties that would otherwise fall on individuals, were said to be representatives. This model of representative labour was a fundamental indicator of freedom (Siey es, 2014a: 122). The act of entrusting others with tasks an individual was unable to complete effectively was an elementary feature of a society in which individuals were able to maximise their ability to act freely. Undertaking these duties oneself placed undue burdens that hindered the capacity for the individual to make free choices effectively. Siey es's response was to encourage individuals to delegate those burdens to others, even if this required relinquishing control. Representation was a 'law of reciprocal commitment'; so long as all in society were committed to reciprocally representing others, acting through others allowed citizens 'to do as [they] want, to do it better, and . . . with as much ease if [they] did it [them]selves' (Siey es, 1999c: 460).
Siey es was attending to the issue of commercial exchange, of which English Commonwealthmen and their French adopters had shown suspicion. The individual was free in commercial society both because they were released from inconvenient tasks, thereby allotting free time, and because those inconvenient tasks would be completed to a higher standard. His intention was to demonstrate that, rather than supplanting virtue and liberty with private interests that were detrimental to the republic, commercial dependency would produce superior forms of liberty. Antiquated arguments of Frankish liberty were not only inflexible in their opposition to emergent social structures of commercial society; in their most malign forms, they were actively detrimental by entrenching the privileged order of the nobility. 15

Republican liberty and the Third Estate
If dependency was critical to individual liberty, it was also, for Siey es, central to the identity of the nation, and to assessing the condition of unfreedom that the Third Estate found itself in. This is significant insofar as Siey es's conceptualisation of liberty was a crucial feature of his revolutionary pamphlets, and it allowed him to advance the cause of the Third Estate. Against both absolutism and its aristocratic republican opponents, he distinguished productive from pernicious forms of dependency, and designed a constitutionalism that celebrated the former and suppressed the latter.
As Siey es understood it, dependency manifested as a 'vital force' (force vive) generated by representative labour. This was the political chemistry for social unification, and so it was 'general work' (travail general) that was 'the foundation of society' (Siey es, 1999b: 176). The linguistic parallel with Rousseau was intentional, and with good reason. Representative labour was more capable of squaring individual liberty with collective identity without requiring anything so 'oppressive' as the civic education of the general will. 16 Representative labour characterised the nation in accordance with his neologism 'adunation' (Siey es, 1789a: 18). In keeping with its obscure ecclesiastical origins, it was analogous to the way in which the apostles were united around Christ to form the Church, and yet remained apostles in their own right (De Baecque, 1996: 97). This ensured that one remained an individual within the political community.
This form of gesellschaft politics also allowed Siey es to draw further distinctions between the three estates, and between the modes of dependency that governed these relations. What Is the Third Estate? was prepared in the midst of the French public debt crisis which stretched the conventional political language of 18th-century French politics to its limits. Siey es feared that the landowning First and Second Estates would choose to declare state bankruptcy in the face of this debt, thereby depriving creditors, primarily commoners in the Third Estate, of their return, while allowing the King's ministry financial autonomy once more (Sonenscher, 1997). Siey es's constitutional theory sought to disentangle decisionmaking from the estate structure of the ancien regime that would allow this. His adaptation of republican liberty was central to this enterprise, and to the identity of the nation that emerged from it.
In the first chapter of What Is the Third Estate?, Siey es discussed at length a sociological definition of the nation. Drawing on his understanding of representative labour, Siey es argued that the nation consisted of a self-sufficient network of commercial exchange that sought to satisfy the needs of the individuals therein (Siey es, 2003c: 94-95). This is because the mechanisms of commercial representation served as a means to hold otherwise unsociable individuals together in political union with one another (Hont, 2005: 476). Siey es argued that these commercial functions were undertaken by the Third Estate, and that the Third Estate alone contained 'everything needed to form a complete nation' (Siey es, 2003c: 95-96). Some have argued that this entailed an 'auto-dialecticalisation' of nationhood, whereby the revolutionary event actualised the potential nation embodied by the Third Estate (Foucault, 2003: 222;Mandelbaum, 2016). This interpretation has Siey es backward, reading him through the revolutionary spirit of the Jacobins. Siey es explicitly rejected this sort of ruptural transformation that would be felt were France to declare bankruptcy. Siey es carved a reformist path that preserved the French debt and attributed it to the nation (Siey es, 2003a: 64-67). To do so, Siey es applied his language of commercial dependency in order to think through the political reordering of the French nation. In untangling the expressions of dependency in pre-revolutionary France, Siey es emphasised the detriment of the legalised inequality of the ancien regime and argued for an alternative to the estate structure.
The dependency generated by representative labour was liberating insofar as it freed the individual from the time-consuming fulfilment of biological necessities and allowed them to divert time elsewhere. However, this required reciprocity, and only the Third Estate were committed to this. The First and Second Estates acted otherwise. The noble order, as Siey es understood it, played no essential role in this commercial exchange economy. Their performance of public services was nothing more than an 'illusion', and their status was defined by 'idleness' (Siey es, 2003c: 96-97). They had no part in the organisation of the nation; they were 'a class of men who, having no function or any utility, nonetheless enjoy the privileges attached to their persons simply by dint of their existence' (Siey es, 2003c: 97, fn. 5). The noble order was a 'burden' upon the nation. The clergy was different, still.
The clergy was a representative profession, providing a service directly to individuals. While they were embedded in an economy of exchange, due to historical reasons they mistakenly assumed themselves to be a distinct order, rather than only a profession, and they bestowed upon themselves a privileged status (Siey es, 2003c: 96, fn. 4).
The variegated language of dependency that Siey es sought to identify had been flattened and degraded in ordinary language as the nobility had 'so loudly claim[ed the language of dependency and subordination] for themselves'. Siey es dismissed the fiction of the th ese nobiliaire spread by the nobility that contended that their subordination to and dependence upon the will of the government was unjust (Siey es, 2003b: 82, fn. 7). Siey es saw that the opposition between governors and governed formed a 'true hierarchy', necessary to society, whereas subordination among the ranks of the governed was what he took to be a 'false, useless and odious' hierarchy (Siey es, 2003b: 82, fn. 7). Siey es was intent to parse this language in a more careful way in his revolutionary pamphlets. Here, he distinguished institutional forms of dependency from commercial variants of symbiotic and parasitic dependency.
The reciprocal commitments of commercial society produced a symbiotic mode of dependency. This was 'not subordination, but continual exchange' (Siey es, 2003b: 82). Because all citizens reciprocally relinquished the autonomy of their will in exchange to represent another's, Siey es did not believe that there was a pernicious effect, so long as commitments were countervailed. This did not amount to a mechanism of oversight; it was a form of trust on the knowledge that a representative would cede control to another within a different area of competence. Perniciousness did follow from the dependency borne by the noble order. In placing themselves outside the relations of reciprocal exchange, the nobility, Siey es argued, were a 'people apart'. They were: a false people that, not being able to exist by itself, since it has no functioning organs, attaches itself to a real nation like one of those parasitic forms of vegetation that live off the sap of the plants that they exhaust and desiccate. (Siey es, 2003c: 97, fn. 5) The nobility were parasitic dependents. This was not the dependency of a slave upon the will of a master, but the dependency of the idle on the economically productive. While Siey es did not expressly use the term 'dependency' to capture this relationship, the contrast he drew with the reciprocal dependency of commercial exchange was plain to see. The nobility enjoyed the commerce of the nation while violating the principle of reciprocity that underwrote it.
This alone only emphasised that the nobility was a fetter upon the productivity of the nation, which, while pernicious and exploitative, did not highlight a relationship of domination or subordination in either direction. The connection between dependency and domination coalesced when the political prerogatives of the privileged order were enacted. Here, Siey es did employ the vocabulary of dependency in line with conventional use by the nobility. However, armed also with his account of commercial dependency, he did so with the express intention of challenging the th ese nobiliaire, and the mixed constitution more generally, which sought to 'balance' the interests of the competing orders. When discussing the Estates-General, Siey es emphasised that the institution was to be 'master of the decision', and that 'no kind of dependency can be allowed to be felt' (Siey es, 2003a: 23). The Estates-General's legitimacy was closely tied to the autonomy of the nation's will, or at least the representation of that will through the pouvoir commettant. What was illegitimate was the domination of the nation's will by the privileged, factional interests of the First and Second Estates. This manifested in an acute way among the rural poor. Siey es recognised that the enterprise of the nobility was to maintain their idleness while turning the rural peasantry against the Third Estate. The nobility, in clinging to the remnants of feudalism, had successfully ensured that the rural workers were left 'living in dependence on the aristocracy', and that this dependency ensured a 'coalition' between the lowest class in society and the privileged orders (Siey es, 2003a: 108, fn 14). The consequence of this material dependence was to extend the political influence of the seigneurial landowners into the Third Estate by way of dominating the rural peasantry. It was on this basis that Siey es advocated necessary measures to counteract this influence. The first had been to exclude those in positions of dependency from acting as representatives, while also restricting the freedom of members of the Third Estate from electing nobles or clerics as their representatives (Siey es, 2003c: 107-110). These were necessary, if unfortunate, courses of action in order to ensure that the commons' confidence would not be usurped by the will of the noble order, and were necessary only until citizens could be removed from the dependency of the nobility and could be judged 'eminently fit' to uphold the nation's interest (Siey es, 2003c: 109).
Siey es saw that the old feudal forms of dependency had not fallen away with the advent of commercial dependency. Instead, commercial society gave a new form to the parasitic dependency of the noble order, now dependent on the urban workers of the Third Estate. For Siey es, commercial dependency, in either of its symbiotic or parasitic variants, was crucially different from feudal dependency insofar as they enhanced the freedom of one or both parties, rather than curtail it. However, so long as the parasitic dependency of the nobility persisted, it would prevent the withering away of the First Estate, and so feudal dependency was able to contaminate the political system. Domination arose through the remnants of the feudal system, and so in order to prevent domination, political representation needed to be severed from the estate structure of the old regime. 17 This had been the basis upon which Siey es had endorsed the geometric redrawing of the administrative cartography of France (Siey es, 1789a). Antoine de Baecque has argued that this intended to disrupt the 'ancestral customs' and 'ethnic personalities' of the French provinces (De Baecque, 1996: 114). While it was Siey es's intention to dull the provincial esprits de corps in order to forge a French Nation, this was because he saw domination, in the form of feudal dependency, at the root of the old provincial system. Siey es was clear that seigneurial offices and the bailliage system were used to conceal 'imperious domination', and that their removal was key to the recovery of liberty in the provinces most removed from Paris (Siey es, 2003c: 107; see also 2003a: 37). The geometric departments sought to do that by supplanting the traditional structures of domination in the provinces.
If symbiotic commercial dependency was to supplant the dependency of the old regime, Siey es believed it possible, even, to square representation with monarchy. This had been at the root of Siey es's disagreement with Thomas Paine. For Paine (2003: 165), monarchy was antithetical to both republicanism and representation insofar as it was premised upon the will of an individual. This was because Paine understood liberty exhaustively in accordance with the Commonwealth tradition, in which monarchy amounted to nothing more than 'arbitrary power in an individual person; in the exercise of which, himself, and not the res-publica, is the object' (Paine, 1994: 146). 18 Siey es opposed this premise, and rejected the connection Paine presupposed between republicanism and representation. This was a category error: while 'representatives' were to be distinguished from 'masters', it did not follow that all republican governments were representative, nor that all monarchs were masters (Siey es, 2003d: 168-169). Rather, Siey es understood representation and mastery to be attached to the two modes of commercial and feudal dependency respectively, and that the two forms of government might be modelled on either, depending upon the underlying social arrangements. The first priority, for Siey es, was to address the socio-economic relations that enabled or frustrated freedom, and then institutional arrangements would fall in line. Within an appropriately representative political system, which was nothing more than an extension of representative labour, the monarch was not a master, but executor of the will of the nation.
While the monarch was the point of an 'individual decision', their power was tempered by the constituent and constituted powers. Siey es referred to this as a 'triangle Monarchy', which was the 'true bulwark of public liberty' (Siey es, 2003d: 171). Tuck (2016: 175) has argued that this amounted to a separation of powers. This point requires qualification. While Siey es had been keen to avoid the language of sovereignty , he did not default to the separation of powers as his alternative. Siey es was dissatisfied with how a republican separation of powers was able to adequately address the issue of domination in France. Through the separation of powers, it was possible to maintain the estate structure and the feudal dependency that came with it. Moreover, constitutions that were premised upon this system of counterweights were precarious; they did not presuppose social unity in anything more than a system of property rights and this meant that none of the various bodies granted fullness of power need plausibly claim to represent the nation (Siey es, 2014c: 154-157). Accordingly, Siey es did not see his 'triangle monarchy' as a separation of powers in the conventional sense. Rather, Siey esian constitutionalism was premised on the 'organised unity' of 'ascending . . . and descending actions' between the nation and its representatives. This granted specific areas of competence to the respective representative organs of the nation, through which they were expected to cooperate, rather than serve as competing counterweights (Rubinelli, 2019b;Siey es, 2014c: 154). When ordered this way, the constitution tempered the plenitude of power so to avoid what Siey es referred to as a 'r e-totale' (Siey es, 2014c: 156), while also ensuring that the estate structure was dissolved so to prevent domination by the noble order.
This also amounted to a reworking of citizenship, when compared to Commonwealth-inspired arguments that emphasised the role of the landed nobility (Boulainvilliers, 1727: 50). The point was more important to Siey es than is ordinarily appreciated. Manin (1997: 3) argues that representation was needed as citizens no longer enjoyed the leisure to participate in public affairs. This marginalises the corollary reasoning that Siey es emphasised, namely, that he was characteristically dissatisfied with a model of citizenship that granted privileges to the economically idle at the cost of the productive, and so he expressly rejected the idea that one's economic independence was a sufficient marker of citizenship. It was not enough that one was a free person. Rather, those Siey es termed 'active' citizens were 'stakeholder[s] in the great business of society' (Siey es, 2014a: 127). 19 While property was a necessary condition of citizenship, for Siey es, it was not a sufficient one to indicate a stake in society. 20 Those who did have the leisure time that would ordinarily allow them to participate in politics should be excluded if that leisure was the result of their parasitic dependence on the labour of others. This applied to all economically idle from the nobility to beggars and vagabonds (Siey es, 2003c: 107).

Pettit, Siey es and constituent power
In On the People's Terms, Pettit (2012: 285-292) appeals to the Siey esian notion of constituent power on the understanding that it can be incorporated into his version of republican constitutionalism. Until now, I have sought to delineate Siey es's commercial republicanism, and to demonstrate that one target was a version of aristocratic French republicanism that drew on the English Commonwealth tradition. In what remains of this article, 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. Siey es's representative labour does not rely on this mechanism of public responsiveness; it was designed to release individuals from the need to vigilantly ensure their interests were being tracked. This was a key feature of his account of constituent power, which sought to disentangle the decision-making of the nation from the individuals who composed it.
Pettit's republicanism does not, of course, endorse what Siey es described as 'liberty of independence'. Pettit argues that non-domination is compatible with mutual dependence so long as interests are appropriately tracked. A constitutionalism of non-domination is maintained through 'republican civility'. One component of this is an ethos of vigilance to ensure lawmaking remains non-arbitrary (Pettit, 1997: 249-250). He is clear, however, that this is compatible with mechanisms of trust. Vigilance does not equate to the refusal of trust; if this were so, the condition of eternal vigilance would force citizens to forgo the liberty they seek to maintain. Vigilance is a form of 'expressive' distrust. The performance of trust and distrust is distinct from the implicit feeling of trust that one may hold of a fellow citizen or institution. There is no tension in possessing implicit trust, while performing expressive distrust. Pettit's recommendation is that 'whatever confidence people feel in the authorities, they will have all the more reason to feel such confidence if they always insist on the authorities going through the required hoops in order to prove themselves virtuous' (Pettit, 1997: 264). The performance of vigilance, for Pettit, is a necessary condition upon which trust can be underwritten, insofar as it provides a necessary safety check within an exchange economy.
Siey es's constitutionalism differed on this fine point. Siey es understood a wellordered society to involve a trade-off between competing conceptions of liberty, and the prevention of domination was to be balanced against the condition of empowerment. Accordingly, if the gains of liberty were sufficiently justified, a mechanism for vigilance may readily give way (Siey es, 1999c: 477;2014b: 149). 21 Under the system of representative labour, the gains to liberty from the delegation of tasks to artisans and experts were significant, and so the threshold at which vigilance was required to police their actions was considerably higher. In practice, this had important implications for the representative system that he designed. Political representation was an extension of representative labour. Siey es was satisfied for constitution-writing to be entrusted to professional representatives as this disentangled the individual from politics and ensured a constitution that was not the product of the whim of the multitude of politically disinterested individuals who comprised the nation (see Sonenscher, 2003: xvii-xxii). Political representatives were experts charged with forming, rather than communicating, the will of the nation. He wrote, 'any nation which is able to form a common will by means of representatives invested with authenticated powers is able to exercise the full extent of the legislative power' (Siey es, 2003a: 13). Siey es, of course, mitigated against the most ruinous forms of domination by excluding from representative offices both the nobility and the rural peasants dependent upon the nobility. Nevertheless, he expressly rejected theories of delegation that presupposed vigilant oversight of a representative's actions. He took these to be 'essentially vicious'; those 'obliged to adhere scrupulously to the commission of those who mandate them' were always at odds with establishing a common will (Siey es, 2003a: 11). Such politics would inevitably return to the estates and provinces of the ancien r egime, for power would cease to emanate from the whole but have its origins in the respective constituencies.
The difference between Pettit and Siey es is rooted in the normative orientation that shapes how a will emanates from the nation. For Pettit, non-domination runs through each step of his argument, and so his preferred mode of representation is guided by 'responsiveness', whereby the people's disposition has priority over the representatives', and a contestatory public square provides the landscape from which representatives draw their positions (Pettit, 2012: 197-199). This was not so for Siey es. While representatives were elected, they were not necessarily guided by the disposition of the nation, or any particular constituents within it, but were to 'form' that disposition. While more substantive than the sort of fictional attribution endorsed by Hobbes, it does not meet the threshold of responsiveness prescribed by Pettit. This was because Siey es prioritised a mode of liberty that sought to release individuals from otherwise burdensome tasks.
This was important to the Siey esian notion of constituent power, too. As Pettit presents it, constituent power features as a component within a 'dual-aspect' model of democracy. In determining the metaprinciples to guide lawmaking, constituent power would serve as the mechanism of vigilance through which the people could assess from critical distance the internal function of constitutional decisionmaking, thus serving as guardians of liberty (Pettit, 2012: 290). 22 Siey es's intention had not primarily been to provide a mechanism of critical oversight. Rather, his formulation of constituent power, like his account of representation, sought to ensure that the political process proclaimed the interest of the nation without allowing the individuals comprising the nation to become entangled with politics. This was because Siey es had a considerable distrust of democracy (Quiviger, 2008: 238). The distinction between constituent and constituted powers was intended to temper the plenitude of power not by checking it with an equivalent power but by allocating the nation only the task of authorising the constitution. This intended to prevent the ordinary legislature from modifying the constitution, so forcing it to work within fixed parameters. However, this was a distinction that cut both ways: the constituent power had no part to play in ordinary law-making. Constituent and constituted powers were compartmentalised within particular spaces of competence. This is clearest in Siey es's rejection of the amendment procedure which would complicate the rigid distinction between constituent and constituted powers, in favour of a new constituent assembly (Siey es, 1789b). Moreover, the people were restricted only to the ex ante selection of extraordinary representatives, exercising the pouvoir commettant (Siey es, 1789c: 36). Thus, while the nation was the nominal bearer of constituent power, it was to be executed by the extraordinary representatives. 23 This was evident in Siey es's decisive rejection of the imperative mandate that would subject representatives in the constituent assembly to public scrutiny (see Rubinelli, 2019a: 59). Representation served as the exemplary tool to vocalise the nation's will in such a way that representatives could act in the name of the constituent power whilst allowing the individual citizens of the French nation to live according to their free choice. Though a national will was necessary, its expression was not to come at the cost of individual non-political liberty.
The restrictions that Siey es placed on the operation of the constituent power intended to achieve a precise goal: to remove individuals from the political sphere as soon as it became viable. This had two aspects. First, in serving the general framework of liberty that he had constructed, the delegation of constitutionwriting to superior representatives was suitable among a population that had neither the education nor time to complete these tasks themselves. Doing so would enhance the freedom of choice among citizens engaged in non-political life. Second, this constitutional structure intended to attenuate the expressive distrust and political participation that, if it came to dominate, may produce a 'r e-totale' (Siey es, 2014c: 156).
The precise ordering of this did change for Siey es throughout the revolution. In the early years of the revolution, Siey es did not think that vigilant guardianship was necessary. A well-designed constitution would be enough, and social relations would settle accordingly (Pasquino, 2008: 23). From 1795, Siey es became more inclined to frame his argument for constituent power in the language of guardianship, professing the place of a 'constitutional jury' to safeguard the constitution (Siey es, 2014c: 159). This was, for Siey es, a recalibration of constituent power in light of what he took to be its misappropriations during the Terror. Nevertheless, this retained the presumption of professional representatives, and a constitutional structure that kept active civic participation to a minimum (Goldoni, 2012: 231-232).
This should be understood as a problem for Pettit's account of republicanism. While Pettit recognises the merits of mutual dependence within an exchange economy and a political system premised upon this, Pettit also understands the notion of constituent power to serve as a mechanism of responsive vigilance against the forms of domination and usurpation that may follow from unscrutinised trust. Siey es did not intend constituent power to operate in this way; rather, constituent power was an extension of the logic of representative labour that, for Siey es, defined the nation, and this intended to disentangle ordinary citizens from political commitments. While Siey esian constitutionalism embedded a foundational set of constraints over legislative action, Siey es expected citizens to place their trust in representatives without recourse to the performative mechanisms of vigilance that Pettit recognises as a necessary guard.

Conclusion
The late 18th and 19th centuries were a crossroads for republicanism. Recent work has successfully excavated a set of 'radical' paths that republicanism took in this period (Gourevitch, 2015;Leipold et al., 2020;Muldoon, 2019). Republicanism fragmented in various directions, though, and this 'radical' genealogy should not delink republicanism from its liberal descendants. Many of the contributions of Siey es's constitutional theory would, in the following decades, be incorporated into the inchoate French liberalism, not least through Benjamin Constant. Even if, as Pasquino (1998) argues, Siey es gave birth to modern liberal constitutionalism, Siey es self-identified as a republican. Part of this article has been an attempt to understand what Siey es understood by that.
Siey es understood his republicanism to hang on an account of liberty that celebrated the advantages gained through reciprocal exchange. Siey es developed this account of liberty in contrast with the 'Frankish liberty' of the th ese nobiliare. These arguments had defended the order of nobles as guardians of Frankish liberty against monarchical absolutism. While Siey es opposed absolutism, he rejected also the justifications that maintained the privileges of the noble order. His conceptualisation of liberty through representative labour allowed both to identify the collective identity of the Third Estate as a relation of symbiotic commercial dependency, and to distinguish cases of collective injustice, namely, the domination of the Third Estate by the privileged order within the Estates General, and the structural conditions that allowed the nobility to survive, parasitically dependent on the labour of the Third Estate. In doing so, however, Siey es side-lined the arguments of civic vigilance that had been employed to justify the unique status of the nobility.
Pettit has maintained that his analytical arguments should stand independently from his historical excavation of a lost republicanism. My argument has intended to confront both components of this claim by drawing on the work of a figure Pettit has invoked for his cause. Historically, the case of Siey es provides further evidence against the coherence of a republican tradition of 'non-domination'. Analytically, too, this is significant as the side-lining of vigilance should be seen as a conceptual problem for Pettit's brand of responsive republicanism because Siey es allows for a considerably higher threshold where political decisions can go untracked. Pettit's interpretation of constituent power loses sight of the fundamental aims of Siey es: the nation, as the abstract bearer of French debt, was to be the nominal authoriser of the constitution, but this was not intended to burden the citizens who composed it. Citizens were not to stand guardian over the constitution but were to release these tasks to professional representatives, so they might act on their non-political freedom. distinction was only a nominal one. This allowed the constitution to be attributed to the authority of the nation while the delegates would exercise the real task of constructing constitutional norms. Siey es was against the notion of a ratification mechanism, and on this point he was out of sync with many contemporaries (Tuck, 2016: 168).