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I wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers, Adam Lebovitz, Alex Gourevitch, Pasquale Pasquino, Antonia Baraggia, Leonard Besselink, and the organizers of the conference Bicameralism under Pressure, LUISS, May 2016.
One of the key tenets of liberal constitutionalism is the idea that power should be limited. Among the different institutional structures meant to realize this principle, persistent preference has been given to bicameral legislative systems. These come in different forms but are all designed to offer solid guarantees against the concentration of power in the hands of the representatives. Second chambers, the argument goes, not only introduce a further layer of separation of power within the legislative but also act as a check against abuses of power by the representatives in the lower house. As such, bicameralism came to be associated not only with the principle of limitation of power but also with liberal constitutionalism more generally. This is evident in both the history of political thought and the work of contemporary scholars. From the American Founding Fathers in the eighteen century to Jeremy Waldron today, bicameralism has been defended as a fundamental feature of the liberal constitutional state.
Yet the history of the latter's relationship to bicameralism is slightly more nuanced, as this paper seeks to illustrate. Certainly, most arguments against bicameralism come from forces external to the liberal constitutional tradition, but these do not concern me here. Rather, I discuss the work of an author who, besides being one of the main figures of the French Revolution, is unmistakably recognized as one of the fathers of liberal constitutionalism, especially in its French iterations.1 This person is the Abbé Sieyès, who consistently opposed the institution of a second chamber in France throughout the Revolution. Parts of Sieyès's argument against bicameralism are interesting for historical reasons. There exist only a handful of studies about French debates on bicameralism,2 and very rarely has Sieyès's role in them received the attention it deserves. This is because his critique of bicameralism has often been taken to be the same as that offered by Condorcet and other américanistes. This is certainly true for some parts of his argument, but it is not the case for them all. And it is precisely where Sieyès departed from his...