Political foundationalism, Angelica Maria Bernal insists, has always been central to constitutional thought and rhetoric. The keystone of political foundationalism is the notion of the “authoritative beginning” (3). To invest in authoritative beginnings is to claim, or more likely just assume, that the legitimacy of the polity rests on a single, superlative moment of origin or creation which establishes the mechanics of the political system, supplies a point of consensus and civic unity, and provides the basis for a set of perpetually binding commitments that stand above and constrain ordinary politics. Whereas in the classical age the authoritative beginning was tied to the exceptional figure of the divine or superhuman lawgiver or founder, in the modern age of constitutionalism ushered in by the French and American republican revolutions of the late eighteenth century, “myth and legend have been replaced by the event” (3). From a foundationalist perspective constitutional modernity's dramatis personae are the founding fathers and the “nation” or “people,” its props constituent assemblies, conventions, documentary constitutions, and the like. Where their predecessors directed the play from offstage, the heroes of political modernity are on stage, leading actors as well as authors.

Bernal sets the scene by providing a widely documented account of the impressive depth and reach of political foundationalism's influence, with studies ranging from Plato's Laws to ancien régime France, from Livy's Rome to revolutionary Haiti, and from the twentiety-century civil rights revolution in US constitutionalism to contemporary Latin American presidentialism. Yet the story is accompanied throughout by critical commentary, and by the development of a richly layered argument that in today's late modern age, where constitutionalism's claim is increasingly dependent on its democratic credentials, it has become more important than ever to resist foundationalism's prodigious charms and recognize that it always promises more than it can deliver. Foundationalism seduces, Bernal contends, by presenting the question of political authority as once and for all settled at the outset, but this is both bad history and flawed normative political theory. Empirically, we may instead experience or come to regard supposedly polity-originating processes and events as contentious, uncertain, and incomplete, and so as unsettled and unsettling. And while a core idea of “founding” remains, for Bernal, indispensable as a way of orienting our thoughts (and practice) to the legitimacy of the polity as a whole, we must expand our horizons. To discover a fuller sense of what foundings are, and what kind of normative authority we should ascribe to them, we should be prepared, in the words of the title, to go “beyond origins,” and take seriously the actors and events that populate the postoriginal life of the polity.

The conceptual key to Bernal's understanding of “founding beyond origins” is the idea of “underauthorized authorizations.” For Bernal, all candidate claims to founding authority are underauthorized in the sense that they inevitably coexist and compete with other candidate authorizations. Why so? There is no place—no Archimedean point—of perfect authorization beyond politics, and equally, as she shows in her brilliant analyses of the prehistory of the mature polities of classical Greece and Rome, there is no time before politics in which a pristine claim to authority can be made and remain unsullied by contestation. Instead, all “constituent actors must reckon with already constituted politics and systems of authority.” Politics, then, has no end and no beginning, no defining punctuation, no crisp binary distinction between the authorized and the unauthorized. Rather, it possesses an unbroken always/already quality; and so the politics of underauthorized authorization describes a continuous cycle of “claims and political actions that challenge the unstable and incomplete authority of an existing political order, often from a precarious or insufficiently authoritative place within it” (13).

In the democratic age the category of “the people” becomes a key counter in the play of underauthorized authorizations. Yet the fluidity and contestability of this new category, embraced by foundational and postfoundational discourses alike, reflects and reinforces the contingency and fragility inherent in the notion of underauthorization. “The people” may be the object of “foundational invocations” (26), either in the form of a conservative originalism associated with the preservation or resurrection of the original ideals of the founding fathers or in the form of a “promissory vision” (33) of a progressive future only loosely inspired by the original text; and, as the US experience graphically illustrates, such foundational invocations, far from restricted to the early years of constitutional settlement, supply resources recursively drawn upon by later generations of constitutional strategists. Equally, however, “the people” may be a newly imagined unity, emerging from yet explicitly set against a previous regime and its foundations, as in the Haitian revolution against imperial France in the first years of the nineteenth century; or, as in the French homeland only a few years earlier, in the “regeneration” of the nation through a first claim to popular constituent power against the Bourbon inheritance. Bernal is especially good at showing how such ideas travel and expand, as when weaving her discussion of the French Revolution around the growing fascination of Thomas Jefferson, while American ambassador in Paris, with the notion of “regeneration,” and his influential reapplication of the idea to his own country's nascent constitutional order. Similarly, when discussing how the people as a postfoundational category can be used in a more explicitly oppositional context, as a way of including within a revisionist politics of (re)founding those previously excluded from the foundationalist narrative, she persuasively demonstrates how the 1947 US Supreme Court case of Mendez on the desegregation of the schooling of children of Mexican ethnicity paved the way for the more famous African American civil rights litigation of the following decades.

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. Yet at points this reader struggled to appreciate just how distinctive its claims are, or indeed could be, in such a crowded field and in the face of such long-standing and well-worn tensions.

On the one hand, for all the prominence of foundationalist thinking, there is also a significant countertradition—or rather various countertraditions—of postfoundational political thought that can be set squarely against foundationalism, and which might not even entertain Bernal's softer language of “founding.” Within normative political theory we can think, for example, of the influential Kantian constructivism of John Rawls. Or within legal theory, there is the equally powerful Dworkinian tradition of postfoundational doctrinal constructivism. These writers do not garner a mention, yet they surely would strongly endorse Bernal's basic argument that what is vital to legitimacy is the consent and commitment, however fragile, provisional, and drawn from plural sources, of those engaged here and now in the practice of constitutional democracy, rather than the purity of the historical pedigree of their claim to authority.

On the other hand, as regards some of the prominent theorists Bernal does refer to and in whom she detects and disapproves of foundationalist tendencies, it is not clear how significantly, if at all, they actually differ from her own position. She judges both Habermasian discourse theory and Bruce Ackerman's theory of iterative constitutional moments to be ultimately compromised by their dependence on an authoritative beginning as a way of avoiding democratic constitutionalism's problem of self-reference. And while her views on agonistic democracy are more mixed, she is also critical of those strains of agonism which focus overmuch on the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary—and so more fundamental—occasions of political struggle and transformation. Yet I doubt whether adherents of any of these schools would want to distance themselves from the idea of founding beyond origins, or would view her concept of underauthorized authorizations as anything other than an insightful addition to their own attempts to explore postfoundational claims to legitimacy.

This points, I think, to an undeniable sociological truth, and to an important normative inference to be drawn from that. In her case studies, Bernal is quick to pick up on shades—however minor—of foundationalist thinking, and apparently unequivocal in her dismissal of them. Yet if the aim is to take the beliefs of contemporary people seriously in their understanding of what should authoritatively frame their political community, we should not entirely discount that part of their beliefs that appeals to the independent authority of origins, whether in conservative or progressive vein. There is certainly much more to the politics of constitutional authority than this, but surely a rounded postfoundationalism can accommodate within its wider arena of legitimate contestation—in which no candidate is seen to possess the foundational truth—those views which continue to invest more rather than less in extraordinary past events. And all the evidence, including much collected by Bernal herself, does suggests that foundationalism, even where it ceases to be dominant, appears destined to remain the recessive sociological gene of constitutional thought—a latent strain liable to re-emerge in newly unsettled times. In the final analysis perhaps Bernal's retention of the very idea of founding, and her lack of attention to normative theories which show little or no curiosity about historical pedigree, suggest that her deepest concern and most telling contribution is that of a theorist of the age-old tension between foundational invocations and present consent, rather than one who has put that opposition to rest.