The Third Estate By Abbe Sieyes Summary

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The Third Estate is everything. As to the author Abbe Sieyes, a nation requires private and public activities to survive and prosper. Four separate classes of The Third Estate that include a people from your basic peasants, to industry workers, and merchants, to the “most distinguished liberal and scientific professions to the lowest of menial tasks.” According to Sieyes the thirds estate comprises nineteen twentieths of the population who absorbs the arduous work that the “privileged order refuses to perform”. Essentially, The Third Estate is the backbone of their social, and economic estate but yet the nobility and the clergy continue to step on them and exploit their labor for capital gain. Abbe brings to light the question as do we not understand the ramifications of a monopoly, while the …show more content…

Sieyes also identifies the reality that if as a society if we were to remove the nobility that The Third Estate could in fact run on its own, if not “something less but something more”. In fact, society as a whole might actually go better without the two others but would cease to exists without The Third Estate. Sieyes actually goes as far to say that the nobility are a “burden for the nation and it cannot be a part of it.” Sieyes speaks to not only the social inequality between the classes but the lack of political representation of more than what is ninety percent of the population. Then nobility itself possess their own representation that was not appointed by the majority, who does not owe any powers to the people due to divinity, and finally it is foreign for the fact that it’s interests lie with private concern rather than public. In chapter two of What is the Third Estate Sieyes proclaims that up until now The Third Estate has been nothing and reform is coming. He says “Freedom does not derive from

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