A Study On Sieyès’ Thought Of Political Representation

In the mid-to-late eighteenth century,the revolutionary trend of thought in France surged,and the profound changes in the basis of sovereignty and the concept of freedom constituted the important characteristics of the times.As the pioneer and leader of the French Revolution,Sieyès played an important role in drafting the declarations of human rights,shaping the principles of national sovereignty and building a representative government.The ups and downs of Sieyès’ life not only reflected the changes of the French revolution,but also condensed the difficult road of the French revolutionary ideological trend.On the eve of the great revolution,French thinkers represented by Sieyès gradually began to think about such an era proposition:after the decline of absolute monarchy,how should the new secular political power lay its own foundation?Sieyès believed that the real goal of the revolution was to establish a representative system based on national sovereignty,to reshape political authority and guarantee individual freedom.Based on this,Sieyès tried to construct a complete set of institutional system,including sovereignty theory,constitutional power theory and representative theory,and put representative in the key link of his revolutionary language system.Therefore,the premise of understanding Sieyès’ political thought is to study its unique and realistic thought of political representative.Through the analysis of historical materials during the Great Revolution and the sorting out of Sieyès literature,the article summarizes the core content of Sieyès’ political representative thought into the following three levels:First,the generation of representatives:An elected representative based on individual consent;second,the role of representatives:An independent representative of safeguarding the public interest;third,the goal of representatives:An sovereign representative in the constitutional power.In order to reflect on the concept of representative with monarchical sovereignty as the core in the old system period,Sieyès reshaped the role and behavior of representative from the perspective of the principle of division of labor and social contract theory,and put forward the concept of representative with modern significance.It is precisely out of his unique understanding of the concept of representation that Sieyès constructed a representative system based on national sovereignty and provided a necessary theoretical tool for the reconciliation of representation and democracy in modern democracy.There are also some defects in the political representation of Sieyès,such as the limitation of the political rights of some people;Excessive emphasis on representative autonomy is easy to lead to the situation of representative autocracy.Through the study of Sieyès’ thought of political representation,we can deepen the understanding of controversial issues in representative theory,so as to provide useful reference for dealing with the contemporary challenges of representative theory.