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Beyond Origins challenges the common view of foundings as singular, extraordinary moments of political origin and creation. Engaging with cases of founding across political traditions ¿ from classical Greece to contemporary Latin America ¿ the book argues that it is only through pragmatist understandings of democratic origins that we can realize the potential for radical democratic change.
List of contents
- 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
About the author
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).
Summary
Beyond Origins challenges the common view of foundings as singular, extraordinary moments of political origin and creation. Engaging with cases of founding across political traditions -- from classical Greece to contemporary Latin America -- the book argues that it is only through pragmatist understandings of democratic origins that we can realize the potential for radical democratic change.
Additional text
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.
