The author's express purpose in this book is “to cast a critical eye on the origins motif as it surfaces in the tradition of political thought” (p. 23). “Political origin stories,” Joanne Wright tells us, “are narratives about the beginnings of politics and power” (p. 3). Origin narratives may be used to consolidate existing or threatened political arrangements, or to inspire radical efforts to reconfigure the prevailing terms of political identity and civic consociation. The crucial thing to note about origin stories is that they function as foundational narratives, effectively setting uncontested and quasi-ontological terms for political identity, aspiration, and legitimacy. In short, though politically motivated, origin stories are perversely antipolitical, in the sense that they “confer upon politics the permanence of nature” (p. 10). Origin stories have a number of other troubling aspects and effects, including “their manipulation of history, their naturalization of conventional political relations, and their function as justificatory scripts of citizenship” (p. 22). The myth of the metals from Plato's Republic offers an exemplary case of the origin story: “the autochthonous myth of the metals justifies and elicits consent to a hierarchical ordering of classes in the republic” (p. 4).

The “persistence and longevity of the origins impulse” (p. 23) is well—if selectively—displayed in the author's choice of material, which includes and highlights the political theories of Plato, Hobbes, Carole Pateman, and radical feminism. According to Wright, origin stories call out for demystification, not merely debunking. Thus, historical and political contexts must be attended to in order to uncover the specific political motivations animating the production of origin stories. Feminist political theory is chastised for failing to apply “the historical sensitivity of contextualist interpretation” (p. 16), and in chapters on Plato and Hobbes, the author demonstrates how such sensitivity yields an enhanced, if also chastened, understanding of the role of gender in political theory. For example, it makes no sense to cast Plato's appeal to a patrogenic cosmogony in the Timaeus as a deliberate effort to suppress the female role in reproduction, given the state of embryological knowledge at the time. Historical inquiry figures prominently in this text, not only as a methodological tool but also as a potential, if modest, substitute for political origin stories. While the author grants that origin stories may not be completely eradicable, she suggests that “history can potentially provide a better, more solid foundation for politics” (p. 12).

Hobbes emerges as a fascinating and unconventional origins theorist here: “Hobbes's significant insight on the origins discourse is his recognition that political solutions cannot be found in the narratives of mythical, historical, or customary beginnings” (p. 76). Why then, did Hobbes create an origins narrative? It turned out to be a useful device for discrediting some constitutional theories with which he disagreed and to demonstrate that precedent is not prescriptive: “Hobbes's origin story in the state of nature does not prescribe any particular political solution. And neither the state of nature nor the social contract summons a golden age that the citizens of England ought to try to recover” (p. 60).

While Hobbes's state of nature is emphatically not an attractive scenario for recuperation, the “first” social contract is presented by Hobbes as the only “logical” solution to the dilemmatic structure of the state of nature, particularly with respect to promise making. Furthermore, this “first” social contract contains instructive lessons about the logic of political legitimacy. It seems to me that Hobbes's state of nature is prescriptive, albeit in a negative sense of avoidance-at-all-costs, and that it plays a vital, if spectral, role in his unique rendering of political legitimacy.

In a separate chapter, Wright explores Hobbes's case for original maternal dominion in the state of nature. She argues, convincingly, that “Hobbes effectively disrupted gender norms, opening a space in which gender relations could be dramatically—if briefly—reconceived” (p. 77). Yet feminists have been more suspicious than appreciative of Hobbes because he fails to follow through with the gender-bending logic he deploys in the state of nature when he turns his attention to civil society. One of the most significant and influential efforts to identify such an underlying logic is Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract (1988).

Pateman is criticized for “a general lack of historical and textual specificity in her theory” (p. 110), for her free-wheeling use of conjecture, for her characterization of Hobbes as a patrogenic thinker, and for offering an “origin story of her own” (p. 121) in which original rape by men over women establishes the conjugal right of husbands over wives. According to Wright, “Hobbes does not explain thoroughly his transition from the state of nature to civil society, and too much is left unsaid for us to make any reasonable conjecture” (p. 116). “Reasonable” conjecture for this author means conjecture that is consistent with the motivations of the theorist. So, she argues, it is extremely unlikely that Hobbes repressed “an all-out battle between men and women that established women's defeat” (p. 117) in the state of nature because he was not really concerned with patriarchy as a conjugal relation. All he cared about was to defeat paternal patriarchalist arguments. Therefore, there is no point in trying to connect the dots between the state of nature (where gender inequality has no foundational backing) and civil society (where it is alive and well).

This argument seems to me to delimit the contemporary enterprise of political theory in unacceptable ways. By restricting ourselves to (our reconstructions of) the conscious and historically plausible intentions of authors, we recuse ourselves from exploring logics of the text that may exceed authorial intent, even as they resonate with and reinforce cultural logics that are complicit with historical and contemporary relations of domination and subordination.

According to Wright, the errors of Pateman's ways are linked to the influence of radical feminism on her thinking. Furthermore, she argues, the radical feminist quest for origins and an “authentic” women's culture contributed, at least in part, to the decline in radical feminist activism by the mid-1970s. Presumably, if such feminists had been less interested in myth making and more interested in contesting “real world” political relations, feminism would have achieved more than it has to date. This sounds pretty conjectural to me, although I am inclined to agree that the search for origins was misguided.

Notably missing from this panoply of origins theorists is Rousseau, whose Discourse on the Origins of Inequality surely qualifies as a masterpiece of the origins genre, even as it complicates and extends the critical analysis to which Wright has committed herself. We might even want to think of this discourse on origins as a performative parody of the origins genre, simultaneously enacting the narrative structure of the political origin story, revealing its fantastic fictionality through counterfactual exaggeration, and putting a powerful and persuasive mythical origins story to work for critical, as opposed to justificatory, purposes. Rousseau, along with Nietzsche, effectively appropriated the genre of origins theorizing in such a way as to undermine the foundational urge that animates such theorizing. And each did so by riding roughshod over “history” and engaging in deliberate and extravagant mythmaking.

This suggests an alternative strategy for countering and contesting the origins impulse. History is not the singular cure for this particular brand of human susceptibility. Nor will a sharp divide between “history” and “myth” save us. Does “history” insulate us from the urge to feed the retrospective foundations imperative, or does it make that urge respectable? How does the invocation of “history,” as opposed to “myth,” make for a better politics? In this important and timely book, Wright has rightly alerted us to the pitfalls of “origins thinking” in political thought. What we still need is a proper appreciation of its seductive power, which is perhaps sublimated, but not yet vanquished, when it goes by the name of “history.”