Western Civilization II / Unit 7 WC2 0632 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading Sieyès: What the Third Estate Is
The idea
The exam quotes Sieyès and asks what he claims. His pamphlet of January seventeen eighty-nine asks three questions of the Third Estate and answers them in three words, everything, nothing, something, and then argues the first. The text read is Fordham's excerpt.
In practice
Read it in three moves. First, the definition of a nation: what is necessary that a nation should subsist and prosper, he asks, and answers, individual effort and public functions; he then lists the classes of effort, agriculture, industry, commerce, the professions, and finds the Third Estate in all of them. Second, the exclusion: the privileged order holds the honors and does none of the work, so the nation, he says, would be nothing less without it but something more. Third, the conclusion, in the anchor's caption: what is the Third Estate, everything, but an everything shackled and oppressed; what would it be without the privileged order, everything, but free and flourishing. The argument turns the estates from three orders into one nation and a parasite.
Where people slip
Sieyès is a theorist of the nation, not of democracy; he voted for the Consulate in seventeen ninety-nine. A passage that identifies the nation with those who do its work is Sieyès; a passage about the general will is Rousseau; a passage about birth and equal rights is the Declaration he helped draft.
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