scholarly journals How to think beyond sovereignty: On Sieyes and constituent power

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia Rubinelli
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Theories Of Sovereignty ◽  
The French Revolution

Historians and political theorists have long been interested in how the principle of people’s power was conceptualised during the French Revolution. Traditionally, two diverging accounts emerge, one of national and the other of popular sovereignty, the former associated with moderate monarchist deputies, including the Abbé Sieyes, and the latter with the Jacobins. This paper argues against this binary interpretation of the political thought of the French Revolution, in favour of a third account of people’s power, Sieyes’ idea of pouvoir constituant. Traditionally, constituent power has been viewed as a variation of sovereignty, but I show it to be an independent conceptualisation of people’s power. Sieyes’ political theory led him to criticise and refuse contemporary theories of sovereignty in favour of what he understood as a fully modern account of people’s power. Based on extensive research in the archives, I show how Sieyes opposed the deployment of sovereignty by the revolutionary Assemblies and recommended replacing it with the idea of constituent power.

Is “the Political” a Romantic Concept?

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rüdiger Campe
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
The Political ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Radical Constructivism ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter analyzes Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political from the vantage point of German Romanticism. For Schmitt, Romanticism wasan intellectual attitude that precluded the concept and practice of “the political.” Through an in-depth reading of a preeminent document of political thought in German Romanticism, Novalis’s Love and Faith, this chapter considers and qualifies this view, arguing that “political theology” can be understood as a reaction to the French Revolution rather than as a tradition reaching back to medieval or baroque times. This chapter also argues that Novalis’s famous essay must be seen as a precursor to Schmitt’s own political theory. Overlap exists both in the blend of conservatism and radical constructivism in Novalis and Schmitt and in the interventionist character of both men’s statements on politics. Read as a precursor to Schmitt, Novalis’s philosophy of politics also offers a meaningful critique of Schmitt’s later theories.

Calvinists, Arminians, Socinians: Popular Sovereignty and Natural Rights in Early Modern Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
James Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Hugo Grotius

This chapter focuses upon natural rights in the writings of Hugo Grotius, the Levellers and John Locke and the manner in which their understanding of rights was informed by distinctive Protestant theologies: by Arminianism or the theology of the Remonstrant Church and by Socinianism. The chapter argues that their theological principles and the natural rights theories that followed from those principles were in conflict with the theology of Calvin and the theologians of the Reformed church. The political theory that marks the distinctive contribution of Calvin and the Reformed to political theory was the idea of popular sovereignty, an idea revived in the eighteenth century, in the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Carl Schmitt’s Political Theory of Dictatorship

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
General Analysis ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter reconstructs the intellectual-historical background to Carl Schmitt’s well-known analysis of the problem of dictatorship and the powers of the Reichspräsident under the Weimar Constitution. The analysis focuses both on Schmitt’s wartime propaganda work, concerning a distinction between the state of siege and dictatorship, as well as on his more general analysis of modern German liberalism. It demonstrates why Schmitt attempted to produce a critical history of the history of modern political thought with the concept of dictatorship at its heart and how he came to distinguish between commissarial and sovereign forms of dictatorship to attack liberalism and liberal democracy. The chapter also focuses on the conceptual reworking of the relationship between legitimacy and dictatorship that Schmitt produced by interweaving the political thought of the Abbé Sieyès and the French Revolution into his basic rejection of contemporary liberal and socialist forms of politics.

The Political Economy of Burke&s Analysis of the French Revolution

1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. A. Pocock
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Single Structure ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

There are, perhaps, in the end only two ways in which a historian may undertake the study of a document in the history of political thought. One may consider it as a text, supposed to have been intended by its author and understood by its reader with the maximum coherence and unity possible; the historian's aim now becomes the reconstitution of the fullest possible interpretation available to intelligent readers at the relevant time. Alternatively, one may consider it as a tissue of statements, organized by its writer into a single document, but accessible and intelligible whether or not they have been harmonized into a single structure of meaning. The historian's aim is now the recovery of these statements, the establishment of the patterns of speech and thought forming the various contexts in which they become intelligible, and the pursuit of any changes in the normal employment of these patterns which may have occurred in consequence of the statements’ being made.

Colonial Exchanges

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

Scholars of political thought have given a great deal of attention to the relationship between European political ideas and colonialism, especially to whether prominent thinkers supported or opposed colonialism. But little attention has so far been given to the reactions of those in the colonies to European ideas, where intellectuals actively sought to transform those ideas, deploying them strategically or adopting them as their own. A full reckoning of colonialism's effects requires attention to their intellectual choices and the political efforts that accompanied them, which sometimes produced surprising political successes. The contributors to this volume include a mix of political theorists and intellectual historians who seek to grapple with specific thinkers or contexts. Contributors focus on colonised societies including India, Haiti, the Philippines, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, and the settler countries of North America and Oceana, in times ranging from the French Revolution to the modern day.

Hegel's Politics: Liberal or Democratic?

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Drydyk
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The State ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Press Freedom ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
The French Revolution

It probably comes as a surprise to no one that Hegel's political philosophy is difficult to interpret. But his political thought clearly poses problems which the rest of his work does not (especially), and these problems arise from apparent political ambivalence on his part towards the French Revolution, towards monarchy, towards the doctrine of popular sovereignty, towards public opinion and press freedom - well, there is scarcely a reader of Hegel who could not add some additional topic to this already lengthy list. For instance, Hegel sometimes noted how crucial it is for a state to be decisive; every state needs a reservoir of decisiveness, supplied preferably by a monarch, who ‘has become the personality of the state,’ who ‘cuts short the weighing of the pros and cons between which it lets itself oscillate perpetually now this way and now that, and by saying “I will” make its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality.’

Tocqueville and the Tyranny of the Majority

1966 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morton J. Horwitz
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Majority Rule ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Tyranny Of The Majority

UNTIL the time Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, the problem of tyranny of the majority had dominated the political thought of no other nation as it had that of America. In the half century before the appearance of Tocqueville's great work, Americans had maintained a virtual monopoly of concern over the question of how popular sovereignty and individual liberty could peacefully coexist. The French Revolution, it is true, raised similar questions abroad, and if we take Burke's concern as representative, we see that he too was seriously troubled over the prospect that democratic tyranny would become the inevitable offspring of popular sovereignty. But despite Burke's eloquent and penetrating analysis, majority tyranny did not become a major preoccupation of English political thought, and to the extent that there was concern with the problem, as in the debate over the Reform Bill of 1832, discussion was confined to the obvious and straightforward issue of whether the suffrage should be extended. In America, on the other hand, the majority problem continued to be a persistent political issue from the beginning and, even today, a host of public questions revolves around the scope of majority rule. Yet for all the attention Americans paid to the majority question before Tocqueville entered upon the scene, they had hardly scratched the surface, and the Frenchman, therefore, was able to suggest an approach that they had not even considered.

Metternich’s Europe

1998 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter explores the childhood of Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900) and the political climate in which he had grown up. He was born in Steingrub, Bohemia in 1890. Of the first twenty-seven years of the man who said that he became a naturalized American amid these surroundings, very little is known, save that he was born into a fettered society; and its chains were heavier because they had been reimposed after a period of near freedom. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had spread throughout Europe the aspiration for popular sovereignty and the rights of nationalities: the Congress of Vienna gave scant recognition to the new forces and set about restoring the ancien régime. The genius of those who set themselves to thwart the allied forces of liberalism and nationalism was Clemens von Metternich, Austrian Foreign Minister from 1809 till 1848. It was in the Austrian Empire where Wise lived that, despite Metternich’s awareness of the need for reform, his system operated to the worst effect.

scholarly journals Liberal and conservative political thought in nineteenth-century Serbia Vladimir Jovanovic and Slobodan Jovanovic

Balcanica ◽  
2010 ◽  
pp. 131-153
Author(s):  
Boris Milosavljevic
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Scene

Two very influential political philosophers and politicians, Vladimir Jovanovic and Slobodan Jovanovic, differed considerably in political theory. The father, Vladimir, offered an Enlightenment-inspired rationalist critique of the traditional values underpinning his upbringing. The son, Slobodan, having had a non-traditional, liberal upbringing, gradually-through analyzing and criticizing the epoch?s prevail?ing ideas, scientism, positivism and materialism-came up with his own synthesis of traditional and liberal, state and liberty, general and individual. Unlike Vladimir Jovanovic, who advocated popular sovereignty, central to the political thought of his son Slobodan was the concept of the state. On the other hand, Slobodan shared his father?s conviction that a bicameral system was a prerequisite for the protection of individual liberties and for good governance. Political views based on different political philosophies decisively influenced different understandings of parliamentarianism in nineteenth-century Serbia, which in turn had a direct impact on the domestic political scene and the manner of government.

Giulio Salvadori and the Catholic Political Tradition in Italy

1982 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-412
Author(s):  
Richard Drake
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Italian Politics ◽  
Pius Ix ◽  
The Church ◽  
The French Revolution

The Catholic political tradition is at the very center of contemporary Italian politics, but the process by which that tradition came into existence and how it evolved remains obscure and often is subjected to extremely simplistic explanations. Modern Catholic political theory began to take shape during the period of the French Revolution. However, it was the Risorgimento that decisively influenced the political consciousness of Italy's Catholics. The unification of the country in 1860 came about largely at the Church's expense. Pius IX, once the darling of Catholic liberals, responded to the Risorgimento with a fusillade of counterrevolutionary invective in Sillabo degli errori del nostro tempo (8 December 1864), still the most notorious example of anguished Catholic imprecations in the post-Risorgimento period. The Church, never comfortable in the post-1789 world, now made unforgettably clear her utter and irrevocable rejection of that world. Her role as the aggressive critic of modernity hardened into one of the outstanding conventions of nineteenthcentury European culture.

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