Sieyès, State metaphysician

Sieyès materialisms

In this work, Pierre-Yves Quiviger deploys a triple Sieyèsian, metaphysical, political and legal materialism. It is the joint outfit of these three theoretical sides that makes us the main richness of his work ; It is therefore on them that we will stop, inevitably leaving aside a myriad of related elements which make it exciting the reading of the work.

The author shows that the metaphysical materialism of Sieyès finds its roots in the sensualism of Condillac which, at a distance from any search for essence, allows a redefinition of metaphysics as “ metaphysics because ». Radicalized in Sieyès, the hypothesis brings all ontology to an epistemology: nothing can be known only in a relationship of the subject speaking to the object it observes. In this context, against Condillac, Sieyès agrees to Leibniz on the need for reflection, in addition to the sensation: it remains essential, condition of possibility a priori Anyway, but Sieyès sets up a joint principle of activity of the ego which allows the order of disorder.

The materialist framework extends politically. Against the criticism usually made to the late Sieyès to have sacrificed political representation, Pierre-Yves Quiviger shows that this sacrifice in fact hides positive research, in a materialist framework. It is a question for Sieyès to represent the nation not as will, from moral principles, but as an economic and social reality, from an analysis of material needs. So we find at Sieyès “ the determination and legitimization of the institutional superstructure by the economic infrastructure (P. 197). The author sees the roots of this system in Sieyès meditation of Spinoza’s metaphysics – and this despite the theoretical incompatibility between the two political works, around personal or public issues (incompatibility that Py Quiviger explains in terms of different relationship to liberalism – which we could have expected a firmer conceptualization, distinguishing more clearly at each occurrence between political and liberalism or liberalism or liberalism or liberalism economic). Spinoza’s rationalism would be transposed by Sieyès from an analysis of the laws of nature towards the idea of ​​an order necessary for human society. If reasoning convinces, nevertheless seems to be missing (or could be added) the link in physiocratic rationalism, that by which Quesnay for example thinks the constitutive natural laws of the best possible government. This order necessary for human society is, for Sieyès, obtained through a social art maximizing individual and collective happiness. According to P.-Y. Quiviger, this art, however, does not contradict economic liberalism as the world can, according to the model of a Leibnizian (and physiocratic physiocratic theodice ?), Oblying yourself and everyone’s strengths are developing thanks to the association.

Since he shows that Sieyès sets up a real “ sociology »(And invent the word) as the basis of the institutional superstructure, it is very logically that P.-Y. Quiviger takes us to an analysis of the legal materialism of that which was at the origin of the creation of the Council of State of the year VIII. Against the figure of the Rousseauis legislator In abstractoprimacy is given, in this system, in the figure of the judge In Concretotaking into account the practical effects of decisions. The scheme of an absolute freedom of the people or its representatives is held at a distance (restricted freedom at the constituent moment), for reasons partly historical after 1793, but, more deeply, warns us P.-Y Quiviger, because of the philosophical preference of Sieyès for a logic of will-activity, opposed to a logic of will-freeness. In a spinozist filiation, Sieyès designs activity as an ability to meet needs, a force producer. The political will is analyzed according to a double movement: a passive will on the one hand, natural, anchored in social reality, indisputable and shared by all, constitutive of fundamental rights that society must keep ; On the other hand, a political will (or, to better say, a decision) exercised by a small number, active, deliberative and representative of the nation, aimed at preserving fundamental rights (which are needs). To achieve this decision, a single governing function is needed (which does not mean a single power). This governing function is designed by Sieyès under two modes: that of a government of action (the administration which governs in the literal sense, since it gives imperative orders, under the leadership of the law), that of a government of thought (the executive management and the Council of State). All this reconfigures the “ areas of theory and practice in politico-legal order »(P. 326): The heart of government activity is of the order of thought that deliberates, of expertise, of the Council.

The Council of State is both Council of Government (which places it at the top of the administration) and judges any illegalism of the administration, as well as the coherence and unity of the normative legal order. Pace Quiviger endeavors to show that the separation of powers theorized by Montesquieu and taken up by the tradition of moderate liberalism (notably Tocqueville) is not found in Sieyès, who nevertheless shares with them this political horizon. Sieyès thinks not a separation, but a dispersion of power, a distribution of functions between different organs. The judiciary is thus distributed between ordinary judges of the judicial order, the representatives (for the political court) and the Council of State (for administrative questions). Rather than separation from powers, Sieyès therefore chooses a hierarchy of standards (the judicial standard being greater than the administrative standard). But P.-Y. Quiviger, unlike Pasquale Pasquino, does not however give a decisive role to the Constitution (as possible guaranteeing all the standards) in the thought of Sieyès: through the role of the Council of State, he highlights a more procedural guarantee and, to say the whole, more immanent. Various realities are both divided and organized within the same plan of immanence.

Disciplinary borders

We can only doubt metaphysicians, attracted by the first half of the work (“ Metaphysics of immanence. Sieyèsian philosophy »), Will push pleasure until the second ; and that lawyers and political scientists, intrigued by the second (“ Immanence of the administration. The Sieyèsian Council of State ), Will come back to the first. They will be all the more encouraged as the book is written with a particularly clear and alert pen. But, yet summoned, historians-even historians of ideas-may not read this book, fear of finding what following John Pocock and Quentin Skinner they learned to hate. They would however be wrong to deprive themselves of this reading. It is true that several fundamental points are likely to hit their sensitivity: the first hypothesis first of all, the method then. The initial hypothesis is that, classically philosophical, of a total coherence of the metaphysical and political work of Sieyès – at least for a “ Sieyès Tardif ». Any diachronic dimension is erased (including even in the smallest material details: if we can only salute the presence of unpublished texts carefully edited in the appendix, we regret that it is never returned to it precisely and that the texts cited in the course of development are almost never dated). It is true that we can refer to this to the good work of Jacques Guilhaumou, which Pierre-Yves Quiviger displays as one of the starting points of his reflection. The method consists of a strictly textual analysis of the work of Sieyès and its inscription in a canon of classic texts-whose author strives as much as possible to determine whether they may have the status of sources for Sieyès or if nothing can be proven beyond the observation of intellectual proximity. Is thus erased almost any normative context external to the text, whether language, social or political. On the other hand, the texts in the filiation of which Sieyès is re -registered are strictly those of the classic philosophical pantheon, so that the entire physiocratic part of the culture of Sieyès disappears (which was undoubtedly not unimportant in the context of a reflection on the legitimate functioning of the administration, even if this reading has already been explored, in particular by Roberto Zapperi).

In this sense, if Pierre-Yves Quiviger explicitly refuses “ The cut between theory and practice “(P. 372) It remains to be understood as he does, as the monist attempt, internal to philosophy, to think with Sieyès” a theoretical practice and a praxeological theory (P. 201). The cut “ between political history and economic and social history, between the history of mentalities and the history of situations (P. 372), on the other hand, is not written in the work. The author is nevertheless well aware of the particular frameworks of his work – which make it the limits and the strength: he traces here and there the sketch of a possible program for a different and prolonged understanding of his objects. Thus he suggests (p. 288) a study of the material reality of the functioning of the Council of State. But for any later approach, his work will remain important, insofar as it allows, by attacking the heart of the Sieyèsian approach, to deconstruct a certain number of myths whose theoretical and practical work has been covered: “ the work of philosophy – as a critical approach – is to question the sense of such a reconstruction and to ask: what is its power to legitimation (…) ? (P. 237). It is therefore good because it is a book of philosophy that it will be useful to historians, and not because it would innovate in the field of intellectual history – which cannot be considered its objective.

Precise on the philosophical level, Pierre-Yves Quiviger obviously wished to write a text which, dealing with an author passionate about the union of theoretical and practice, is also useful for today. We may not share his enthusiasm for the “ state liberalism From Sieyès, but the configuration of knowledge and power which is emerging through him is far from being without historical and political interest. Under the pen and action of Sieyès as represented by the author of Principle of immanenceseem to be born jointly sociology as an analysis of social and political management as a reflection on the possible modes of application of the law in the social world. Faced with a power today redefined from the only action in the most trivial sense, this return to thought is to be meditated: with Sieyès and against Condillac, it is undoubtedly necessary to give reason to Leibniz so that the sensation is attached to the reflection.