Sieyès: Political Writings: Including the Debate Between Sieyes and Tom Paine in 1791

The abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes (1748—1836) distinguished himself as the chief theoretician of the French Revolution—and as a revolutionary constitutional and social theorist in his own right—through his rigorously analytical theory of representative government and its corollary, the representative character of social life in general. He expressed the essence of his thought in a series of three pamphlets published in the months leading up to the meeting of the Estates—General in 1789. This ...