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. (shrink)

This essay revisits the long-standing debate concerning the sources for the underlying political beliefs and commitments held by the “founding generation,” those colonists who came to the conclusion that separation from the mother country was necessary and inevitable. It uses a mixed mode of enquiry and analysis, blending standard close reading of texts with computer-aided inspection of the archive at scale. It seeks to clarify the extent to which a set of political assumptions and theories widely assumed to be gathered (...) under the rubric of “republicanism” could have shaped the thinking of this founding generation. Given that the term “republicanism” was very infrequent until the last decade or so of the eighteenth century, the essay proposes ways of interrogating the historical formation of concepts for which no label can be easily discerned. Following the consideration of some candidate terms or phrases that might, at the time of the American Revolution, have effectively been hosts for the political idea of “republicanism,” the essay arrives at the conclusion that the founding generation reimagined the role that “republicanism” had played in their thinking at the time. (shrink)