Beyond Origins

Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy

Author Angélica Maria Bernal

Challenges originalist and foundationalist thinking regarding state-building and constitutional law
Develops a new conceptual approach to founding events: "founding beyond origins"
Offers a new understanding of foundings, founding moments, and founding action that crosses disciplines and regions of study
Provides new readings of important intellectuals in classical and contemporary political thought
Emphasizes the role of exclusion and excluded populations in remaking constitutional democracies

Beyond Origins

Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy

Author Angélica Maria Bernal

Description

The foundings of constitutional democracies are commonly traced to singular moments. In turn, these moments of national origin are characterized as radical political innovations, notable for their civic unity, perfect legitimacy and binding authority. This common view is attractive as it suggests original founding events, actors, and ideals that can be evoked to legitimize state authority and unify citizens. Angélica Maria Bernal challenges this view of foundings, however, explaining that it is ultimately dangerous, misguided, and unsustainable.

Beyond Origins argues that the ascription of a universal authority to original founding events is problematic because it limits our understanding of subsequent foundational changes, political transformation and innovation. This singular view also confounds our ability to account for all of the actors and venues through which foundation-building and constitutional transformation occurs. Because such understandings of national foundings obscure the many power struggles at work in them, these origin stories are troubling and unhelpful.

In the wake of these limited views of founding, Bernal develops an alternate approach: "founding beyond origins." Rather than asserting that founding events are authoritatively settled and relegated to history, this framework redefines foundings as contentious, uncertain, and incomplete. Indeed, the book looks at a wide variety of contexts-early imperial Rome; revolutionary Haiti and France; the mid-20th century, racially-segregated United States; and contemporary Latin America-to reconsider political foundings as a contestatory and ongoing dimension of political life. Bridging classic and contemporary political and constitutional theory with historical readings, Bernal reorients approaches to foundings, arguing that it is only through context-specific and pragmatist understandings of political origins that we can realize the potential for radical democratic change.

Beyond Origins

Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy

Author Angélica Maria Bernal

Introduction

Part I: Foundings and Foundationalism

Chapter 1: Foundational Invocations: Contemporary Politics and the Problem of Original Authority

Chapter 2: A Good and Perfect Beginning: Plato's Laws and the Problem of the Lawgiver and the People

Chapter 3: A Tale of Two Democratic Foundings: US, Haiti, and The Problem of Self-Constitution

Part II: Founding Beyond Origins

Chapter 4: Foundings, Origins, and Repetition: Livy's Roman Foundings Reconsidered

Chapter 5: The Promise and Perils of Presidential Refounding in Latin America

Chapter 6: The Regenerative Founding: Jefferson, the French Revolution, and Democratic Founding

Chapter 7: Another Birth of Freedom: Méndez and the Constituent Power of the Excluded

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Beyond Origins

Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy

Author Angélica Maria Bernal

Author Information

Angélica Maria Bernal is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research centers on the history of foundings, revolutionary and constitutional politics, Latin American politics, and indigenous rights and social movements. She is a former Fulbright Fellow, an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Humanistic Studies, and author of De la Exclusión a la Participación: Pueblos Indígenas y Sus Derechos Colectivos en el Ecuador (Abya Yala Press, 2000).

Beyond Origins

Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy

Author Angélica Maria Bernal

Reviews and Awards

APSA Foundations of Political Theory First Book Award, Honorable Mention

"The book is a well measured, elegantly written resource for anyone interested in the long history and resilient resonance of foundationalist constitutional thought, as well as its empirical and ethical blind spots. It also offers a subtle contribution to postfoundational thought-a framework for offering a more carefully nuanced and ethically sensitive account of the stakes of constitutional legitimacy." -- Neil Walker, University of Edinburgh, The Review of Politics

"Beyond Origins makes an essential contribution to contemporary democratic theory's efforts to pluralize the founding 'event' and to reconceptualize the fraught relationship between the authority of political foundation and the imperatives of radical democratic change. The book's breadth and nuance of engagement-from Plato's Laws to the Haitian Revolution, from Livy's Rome to contemporary Latin American populism-is stunning." --Jason Frank, Professor of Government, Cornell University

"A remarkably far-ranging meditation on the promises and problems of constitutional foundings. Bernal treats us to a journey across time, space, and states. In doing so, she not only reveals the importance of foundational ideas for constructing power and a 'we, the people', but she also provokes us to consider how different generations and groups continue to confront and shape these core ideas." --Elizabeth Beaumont, author of The Civic Constitution: Civic Visions and Struggles in the Path Toward Constitutional Democracy

"This is an extraordinarily lucid and elegantly written book, tackling one of the most difficult issues of political thought: what constitutes the 'founding' of a polity? Why are those dates, acts, documents given authority and legitimacy? Bernal disputes the foundationalist philosophy that underlies such views of founding and proposes instead the view of foundings as 'partially authorized beginnings,' that can always be contested across time by the excluded and marginalized. This work enlightens us about the principles of democratic theory and practice." --Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University