What Is the Third Estate? What Is the Third Estate? What Is the Third Estate? () is a political pamphlet written in January 1789, shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution, by the French thinker and clergyman Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836). The pamphlet was Sieyès' response to finance minister Jacques Necker's invitation for writers to state how they thought the Estates-General should be organized. In the pamphlet, Sieyès argues that the third estate – the common people of France – constituted a complete nation within itself and had no need of the "dead weight" of the two other orders, the first and second
What Is History? that historians deem unimportant, and "historical facts", information that the historians have decided is important. Carr contended that historians arbitrarily determine which of the "facts of the past" to turn into "historical facts" according to their own biases and agendas. For this reason, Carr argued that Leopold von Ranke's famous dictum "wie es eigentlich gewesen" (show what actually happened) was wrong because it presumed that the "facts" influenced what the historian wrote, rather than the historian choosing what "facts of the past" he or she intended to turn into "historical facts". At the same time, Carr argued that the study