Sieyès, lecteur critique de l'article « Évidence » de l'Encyclopédie (1773)

Abstract

Jacques Guilhaumou : Sieyès's Critical Reading of the Encyclopédie Article Évidence. We publish here a manuscript found among Sieyès's personal papers at the Archives nationales, containing the criticism he wrote in 1773 of the unsigned Encyclopédie article Évidence, which he attributed to Quesnay. This early writing shows Sieyès's désire to conduct a philosophical and economic critique of Physiocratic doctrines, in which economic thought is part of a wider conception of "political metaphysics". Despite its incomplete and fragmentary nature, we can see in this brief text a sensualist argument, taken from Condillac and Locke, concerning the status of abstraction, which provides the basis for the study of the interaction between the self and the world. Taken with another manuscript dating from 1774, this shows us a similarity with Kant and Fichte; in order to see how far Sieyès was elaborating a French version of German idealism, we need to study all of his philosophical manuscripts.