Book Review: Beyond Origins: Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy, by Angélica Maria Bernal

• Published date: 01 February 2019
• Date: 01 February 2019
• Author: Joshua Simon
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718797523
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

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Political Theory 47(1)
For Beauvoir, as for Wright, transformative politics requires solidarity
more often than friendship. It frequently involves acting with those we may
not particularly know or like in order to resist powerful state and other institu-
tions. Furthermore, it may sometimes require us to objectify those with whom
we act in solidarity, as Beauvoir did Boupacha. What Marso offers in her
encounter with Beauvoir (and, in the company of Beauvoir, in her encounters
with so many others) is a wonderful set of illustrations of the bodily and
affective aspects of politics that are too often overlooked. However, as
Beauvoir also shows us, “freedom in the encounter” may require that we act
in more impersonal ways than Marso proposes, forming alliances with those
who are not our “friends.”
Beyond Origins: Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy, by Angélica
Maria Bernal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Reviewed by: Joshua Simon, Political Science, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591718797523
Angélica Bernal’s incisive new book begins by posing a deceptively straight-
forward question: “What is a founding?” As Bernal notes, invocations of
foundings, founders, and foundational principles are common in everyday
political discourse, and these invocations imply, even when they do not actu-
ally articulate, a ready answer to her question. “Founding, this view tells us,
is the original event at which a constitution is drafted and a democracy attains
legal identity and political authority. It is an authoritative moment that fixes
something supreme in the life of a constitutional democracy: its higher law
and a defining set of political commitments, principles, rights, and values that
anchor its continued life” (1). But Bernal argues that this familiar vision begs
as many questions as it answers. Who does the drafting and on what grounds
do they claim the authority to draft? Exactly when do the principles, rights,
and values fixed in the course of a founding become fixed, and for how long
should they remain fixed? Who makes up the collectivity that acquires legal
identity and political authority in a founding? Who were they before the
founding? What can they become afterward?
These questions have been posed before, and the difficulties that arise in
answering them have inspired some of the most notorious doctrines in the
western canon. Plato suggested that a creation mythology should be dissemi-
nated amongst the subjects of his imaginary polity to secure their initial
acceptance of the places and prospects they were allotted under the regime.

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Book Reviews
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Machiavelli insisted that a “new prince” must have recourse to almost any
means necessary if he was to accomplish the almost impossible tasks of
assuming and maintaining his status. And Rousseau made the essential para-
dox presented by the founding of a legitimate government explicit: “For an
emerging people to be capable of appreciating the sound maxims of politics
and to follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to
become the cause. The social spirit that ought to be the work of that institu-
tion would have to preside over the institution itself. And men would be, prior
to the advent of laws, what they ought to become by means of laws.” On
Rousseau’s account, only the intervention of an extraordinary founder could
resolve this dilemma.1
Contemporary political theorists are more resigned to the paradoxes of
political founding. Some, including Bruce Ackerman, Jürgen Habermas,
Andreas Kalyvas, and Paulina Ochoa-Espejo, offer different accounts of pro-
visional foundations upon which constitutional democracies can claim legiti-
macy in the present, while acknowledging the injustices of the past, and
without foreclosing future revisions.2 Others, including Bonnie Honig,
William Connolly, and Jason Frank, argue that efforts to resolve the theoretic
and historical tensions inherent in foundings should be abandoned, suggest-
ing, again in different ways, that we should acknowledge the irresolvable
philosophical problems present in our political concepts and embrace an
image of politics as necessarily involving...