Angélica Maria Bernal’s beautifully composed and meticulously researched book deepens existing debates concerning the concepts of founding and foundations. Illuminating her central theoretical points through readings of Plato and Livy, Thomas Jefferson and the 1805 Haitian Constitution, recent Latin American presidential refoundings, and the Mexican-American parents in 1940s Orange County who challenged their children’s segregation from California’s public schools, Bernal compellingly demonstrates that founding “is neither a concept nor a problem restricted to a singular tradition of political thought” (p. 21). She also shows that with insurmountable paradoxes at the core of democratic founding, such acts are therefore always lacking in legitimacy and characterized by underauthorization.

In each instance, Bernal explores how founding events are elevated in civic narratives through their sanitation. What places them supposedly beyond need of justification and out of reach of contention is retroactive reconstruction that washes them clean of their inevitable internal conflicts, exclusions, and violence. After all, there can be no pure political origins. Founding never comes from nowhere; there are no pristine ruptures with the past. Instead, even as founders seek to build consensus and unity, foundings take place in already politically constituted contexts and in reference to existing elements of those realities. Their contentious, uncertain, and incomplete nature, especially evident in Bernal’s commentary on contemporary acts of refounding by regimes in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, means that they remain open to future resistance and, with it, possibilities for further innovation and transformation.

For readers who might otherwise be seduced by heavily theoretical debates or short-term political thinking, the author offers regular reminders that building political power and legitimacy for the marginalized and the excluded takes years and countless frustrated efforts. However, while many have demonstrated this observation in the study of social movements and processes of identity formation, few, if any, have used it to revisit the default approaches to thinking about founding. Indeed, one of the singular strengths of Beyond Origins is taking insights typically used to generate a sense of impossibility and putting them in the service of its opposite. For example, for Bernal, the fact of the people always being underauthorized is not a reflection of their fictionality or failure, but instead of a fruitful lack of closure that signals what they can do—namely, “expose and exploit the system’s own underauthorized nature” through “channeling and organizing . . . [the] agency of those who . . . dissent because their needs remain as yet unfulfilled” (p. 101).

In this regard, the book makes free use of the accurate description “bad history.” First, Bernal argues that constitutional originalists engage in a “historical fundamentalism” that, with no care for chronology or historicity, frames the U.S. Founding as ageless and sacred. In their hands, a quarter century of fierce political disagreement, democratic deficits, and vast illegalities at the time of the Constitution’s signing are compressed into a set of clearly worked-out ideas avowed by everyone (p. 37). The second instance of “bad history” is Hannah Arendt’s account of the distinctive features of the American versus the French Revolution (pp. 89–90). In both cases, “bad history” refers to an instance when “the past” is misleadingly invoked not only to suggest that a particular political claim is indisputably right but also to show that such claims are always already authorized.

Livy’s writings offer the clear contrast. Refusing sharp temporal demarcations (p. 114), Livy gives the past an immediacy with which it can confront the present. In addition, his models of political actors are not even semidivine. They are of all-too-human people who usually found through refounding or by committing to maintain relations or institutions in changing circumstances (pp. 110–12). Rather than giving form to the unformed by imposing a theoretical shape on the lived world, they act in direct response to its rising exigencies (p. 114). However, if one lacks Livy’s “perpetual people” and can work only with differing arrangements of mobilized citizens (p. 234) and no self-evident historical record, how do historically constituted and informed experiences of particular groups (especially the oppressed with particular investments in the evidential weight and concern with the veracity of its retelling), develop into shared accounts of their antifoundationalist origins? Bernal’s arguments invite reflections regarding how we conceive a nation’s history as a relationship of multiple, opposed ways that people have made their past speak.

It is in this spirit that the author offers repeated criticism of teleologies. For instance, she writes that “giving a preeminent place to contingency . . . prompts an analysis that dispenses with teleological or deterministic understandings of founding processes and outcomes. . . . The framework advanced here shifts focus from singular founders and outcomes toward complex political dynamics and the broader range of actors immersed in them” (p. 10). Teleologies appear, then, as further instances of the way that foundings are used to establish a “‘time zero’ that establishes a [unilaterally directed] linear trajectory” (p. 44).

However, one might ask, does Bernal’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the meaning of foundings not contain implications for how to reconceptualize the idea of the telos as well? Specifically, given that the act of constitution does construe a terrain of rough horizons, is there not an implicit call here for dialectically open teloi? If constitutions, by their very nature, constitute trajectories, the aim would not then be their eradication so much as to determine how best to cultivate their quality and nature. This question spurs another one regarding a form of periodization that informs the book’s carefully constructed architecture. Specifically, Bernal suggests a neat and familiar unidirectional development from legitimacy based on the divine (whether construed as gods, kings, or dictators) to authorization by nations, the people, or by us (p. 75). While there is no question that all contemporary efforts to justify leadership have to contend with democratizing terms and logics, the examples of the U.S. Tea Party’s likening of the Constitution to the Bible and of mythic Latin American presidential refounding suggest more uncomfortable and synchronous fusions of the suprahuman with the constituent power of the people. Rather than one form cleanly displacing the other—as mythological founding narratives might have it—both sets of vocabularies and registers appear to remain in circulation, mobilized in familiar and new combinations.

This ongoing presence of competing forms of meaning making informs a penultimate question regarding how Bernal uses the word “myth” disparagingly to describe ideas that are fallaciously deployed in ideologically opportunistic ways: If we act on the basis of her analysis of underauthorization, as I think we should, would acts of constitution not be drenched with potentially debilitating anguish precisely when undertaken with sober honesty? After all, one could be mistaken about the right course of action or how the backlash it will spawn might unfold. When facing such radical uncertainty in cases when the consequences really do matter, however, is there not a politically healthy place for ritual resources and practices that are not narrowly rationalistic—the terrain many call myth? Might these facilitate shouldering the enormity of political responsibility in ways that still allow us to distinguish the forms that help us not to collapse into bad faith from those that would encourage it?

Finally, most accounts of refounding center a state that, governing a particular territory, would answer the needs of its citizenry more fully or adequately. An excellent example in Beyond Origins is the discussion of the promissory founding of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., which placed the redemptive power of the authority of the Founding Fathers in the promise of their ideals as regulative and binding intergenerational commitments (p. 40). But how should we consider instances of forced inclusion—where membership and greater inclusion are not a people’s singular aim but, rather, one that sits in fundamental tension with the establishment of political relations between one set of settler colonial founders and refounders of a separate, engulfed sovereignty? Is there room in anti-foundationalist founding to be left out? Additionally, are there resources in foundations beyond origins for creating constitutions that do not map belonging only onto the physical terrain of the nation-state but also onto particular political commitments, such as abolitionism or the substantive linking of displaced, diasporic communities? Could such constitutions connect people into new forms of political union?

As these questions illustrate, Beyond Origins is a rich work in political theory that reframes founding “not only [as] the abstract problem of establishing the law’s authority, but [through] the . . . political dilemmas faced by actors in the midst of precariousness, uncertainty, and instability” (p. 14). As such, democratic refounding is not attained in episodic, triumphant moments. Bernal shows us that instead, it emerges through processes of ongoing struggle (p. 158), which themselves birth new and unprecedented constitutional challenges.