Sieyes introduces a rectilinear, State-oriented history replacing the cyclical revolution-return model
Evidence
We now have a discourse on history that is more sympathetic to the State and which is no longer, in its essential functions, anti-State. The objective of this new history is not, however, to let the State speak its own self-justificatory discourse. It is to write the history of the relations that are forever being woven between nation and State, between the nation’s Statist potential and the actual totality of the State. This makes it possible to write a history which will obviously not become trapped in the circle of revolution and reconstitution, of a revolutionary return to the primitive order of things, as was the case in the seventeenth century. What we do now have, or what we may have, is a history of a rectilinear kind in which the decisive moment is the transition from the virtual to the real, the transition from the national totality to the universality of the State. This, therefore, is a history that is polarized toward the present and toward the State, a history that culminates in the imminence of the State, of the total, complete, and full figure of the State in the present. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 239
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines the new ‘rectilinear’ history of nation/State relations, distinct from both the seventeenth-century State self-justification discourse and the nobiliary reaction’s anti-State history.
- XREF: Contrasts with the cyclical returning-to-origins history argued in earlier chapters of Foucault’s course; relevant to how later theorists model nationalism’s teleology. — connects to: Sieyès inverted prior theory by making works precede the nation juridically — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 234