Chapter 2 examines the concepts around which, in the wake of 1789, early democratic polities developed and explained their legitimacy, in and outside Europe. It explains how these concepts were based in military processes, showing how early-democratic ideas of citizenship were linked to military recruitment patterns, caused by fiscal weaknesses in many eighteenth-century states. It argues that the military origins of democratic concepts instilled deep constitutional antinomies in early democracies, with the result that the organizations that promoted electoral rights and citizenship also acquired highly coercive functions. The military origins of modern democracy meant that modern states first took shape in a dialectical form, which was simultaneously empancipatory and repressive. It concludes that the military character of the modern citizen disrupted the processes of legitimation and integration in relation to which it was initially constructed.