The plan of this book is fairly simple. We must ask ourselves three questions.

1. What is the Third State? Everything.

2. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing.

3. What does it want to be? Something. . .

[Abbe Sieyes, “What is the Third Estate?”]

Revolution is the realization of the people’s need for validation, the manifest desire to be recognized as autonomous selves aggregated into a sovereign entity, to become something greater and not merely another natural resource taken for granted.

Joyce very nicely hints at this, with an economy of words in an otherwise garrulous work.