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
One-third hypothesis theory. One-third hypothesis The one-third hypothesis (OTH) is a sociodynamic idea—advanced by Hugo O. Engelmann—that asserts that a group's prominence increases as it approaches one-third of the population and diminishes when it exceeds or falls below one-third of the population. As the one-third hypothesis was stated originally by Hugo O. Engelmann in a letter to the "American Sociologist" in 1967: "...we would expect that the most persistent subgroups in any group would be those which approximate one-third or, by similar reasoning, a multiple of [i.e., a power of] one-third of the total group. Being the most persistent, these groups also