What is the People?
Combination of images, both courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. Jacques Louis David, Serment du Jeu de Paume and U.S. Congress.
The way we do politics today is not how it has always been. Far from it.
I think we know of this on an intuitive level; the strongest argument that compels one to go to the ballot today is that one party is “the lesser of two evils.” We know that the window of policy difference between the Democrats and Republicans in the United States is claustrophobically narrow, and that there is no room for revolutionary politics in Congress, nor amongst the people. And yet, we are continuously confronted in our history classes with the Age of Revolutions, which envisioned something far greater than our political imagination and capacity today. We know that there was once a time when parliaments grappled openly with the very nature of our freedom, the foundational rights of individuals, and the meaning of social existence.
We know, then, that at the dawn of the 19th century, politics was alive, and that by the beginning of the 21st century, it was dead. Something must have intervened that replaced all the philosophers with bureaucrats, idealists with public servants. There are many ways of reading into this problem. In the limited space of this column, I want to give you a brief glimpse of what a living political body looks like through the eyes of history. So take a deep breath, don your sans-culottes, and fasten your tricolour cockades. We are off to France, 1789.
Few moments illustrate the philosophical dimension of politics in the French Revolution more powerfully than Abbé Sieyès’ response to Jacques Necker, the finance minister under Louis XVI. Necker had sought guidance from political writers on how to organize the king’s advisory body, the Estates General, and instead of addressing Necker’s question, which limited the question of the Estates General to purely administrative matters, Sieyès reframed the issue, asking instead: “What is the Third Estate?” In this existential question alone, we find the first political expression of a society demanding a self-identity. Sieyès’ reply—“Everything”—was not rhetoric, but the opening move in a radical reconceptualization of the meaning of politics.
It is in the first part of his pamphlet that Sieyès translated the abstract idea of social freedom (first articulated by Rousseau as the “general will”) into concrete political forms. For Sieyès, the Third Estate, in contrast to the First Estate, composed of the clergy, and the Second Estate of the nobility, was alone the living embodiment of society itself. He argued that this estate, composed of peasants, laborers, artisans, merchants, professionals, and intellectuals, was responsible for all the essential functions of society. It produced agricultural and industrial goods, sustained its trade networks, staffed and provisioned its military, and carried out the specialized work of doctors, lawyers, educators, and philosophers. So really, “everything.”
The conclusion follows logically: if the Third Estate does everything necessary for society’s survival and flourishing, in other words, the social rights over that society, then it must also be entitled to the political rights over that society: power to constitute itself, become itself, and control itself. Philosophy, to Sieyès, was inseparable from language and the spirit of politics.
This understanding was not unique to him, as it set the tone for what followed. The history of the French Revolution is marked by a succession of these dynamic moments. I should mention Mirabeau’s response at the royal session of the National Assembly on 23 June, 1789, to the king's envoy, who had come to deliver the order to dissolve the Assembly: "Tell those who send you that we are here by the will of the people and will leave only by the force of bayonets!" Another fan favourite was when Desmoulins, responding to the dismissal of the popular finance minister by Louis XVI, climbed onto a table at the café Foy, drew a pistol, and lit the fuse: “To arms, to arms!” Saint-Just’s intense 1792 speech on the fate of the King similarly encapsulates the revolutionary fever, when in one of the many thunderous crescendos, he declared, “No man can reign innocently!”
Moments like these reveal a kind of political conviction that feels almost unimaginable today. Perhaps nowhere is this contrast more profoundly expressed than in Robespierre’s 1794 speech, “On the Principles of Political Morality.”
“What is the end of our revolution? The tranquil enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of that eternal justice, the laws of which are graven, not on marble or stone, but in the hearts of men, even in the heart of the slave who has forgotten them, and in that of the tyrant who disowns them.”
Robespierre, perhaps the most devout abolitionist of his time, is not here referring to the plight of the enslaved in France’s colonial holdings. Rather, he addresses a more insidious form of servitude, the political oppression of oneself from within oneself, echoing what Rousseau described in The Social Contract as the condition of “vile slaves” who “grin in mockery at the name of liberty.” Robespierre speaks about the citizenry, having once glimpsed the horizon of emancipation, has retreated into cynicism and complacency. Thus, he speaks to us, people who have abandoned the transformative ideals that once animated politics. We, who in our vague political imagination can no longer conceive of human nature as contingent and society as an entity with limitless potential.
Robespierre’s political morality hinged on precisely this point: that the human subject is not fixed, but formed through collective life and civic virtue. His vision was anthropological transformation. Laws, he claimed, must awaken “generous passions” in the hearts of the people and not simply pose as fragments of language. This was the ethical foundation of the Republic: a society grounded in shared public virtue.
You get the point. These pivotal moments, moments that highlight the eclectic personalities who led the republic, moments of energy and zeal, and of philosophic inquiry, were all fundamental, not only to the politics of France during the 1789 Revolution, but also to the rights and freedoms we cherish today. It was only because they were politicians as philosophers and not as statesmen that they discovered the social demand for freedom and pursued it without conviction.
Our understanding of political rights is much less ambitious today. That ambition, the belief that politics could reforge the human condition, seems unintelligible. The most radical and “transformative” political decision we have seen in the past 10 years of American politics could possibly be Trump’s international tariffs. That, regrettably, is the horizon of our political moment.
It is no wonder, then, that in a place like Columbia, a policy school, above all, the deeper questions of sovereignty and freedom barely register. We let the NYU kids wander about that. This is why, when CPR published an op-ed titled “The ‘Radical Left’ Needs to Start Playing Dirty,” encouraging the Democrats to use anti-democratic weapons such as filibustering and gerrymandering more assertively, and simultaneously rendering them effectively indifferent from the Republicans, I was not surprised at all. Although CPR advertised this article as a “provocative argument,” I really thought the opposite. Telling politicians to abandon their principles in order to win in office is truly a timeless strategy, but it leans more on the milquetoast side of the spectrum.
This reading of politics as public policy, whereby voters are consumers demanding public goods, is the political compass reading of politics. It is not provocative one bit. It appears to me that the most provocative and radical stance one can take today is to unapologetically advocate for what one believes to be true. This is the difference between the politics of 1789 and 2025.
Perhaps this is what best explains populist movements and the politicians who emerge from them, such as the likes of Trump. The social demand for politics is inevitable. The people will always want to actively be part of a whole and express their demand for freedom. The people will always want to be led. We cannot pretend otherwise and declare that “politics should be boring,” that it is just a matter of policy.
The unfortunate reality is that the further we run away from 1789, the more our politics will reflect an uglier side of that epoch, precisely that which materialises in Trump.
Then, the “radical left,” if such a thing still exists, should grab these cat theorist Democrats and cosplay Republicans by the collar and tell them that they do not, and will not in their current state, represent our political and social desire for freedom. When asked the question “what is the most cost-effective model for healthcare?” we should respond with a question of our own, as did Sieyès: “what is the People?”
Yunus Akdal (GS ’26) is a political science major and critical theory enthusiast. Contact Yunus if you disagree at ya2545@columbia.edu.