PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
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).
This is an extraordinarily lucid and elegantly written book, tackling one of the most difficult issues of political thought: what constitutes the 'founding' of a polity? Why are those dates, acts, documents given authority and legitimacy? Bernal disputes the foundationalist philosophy that underlies such views of founding and proposes instead the view of foundings as 'partially authorized beginnings, ' that can always be contested across time by the excluded and marginalized. This work enlightens us about the principles of democratic theory and practice. --Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University Beyond Origins makes an essential contribution to contemporary democratic theory's efforts to pluralize the founding 'event' and to reconceptualize the fraught relationship between the authority of political foundation and the imperatives of radical democratic change. The book's breadth and nuance of engagement-from Plato's Laws to the Haitian Revolution, from Livy's Rome to contemporary Latin American populism-is stunning. --Jason Frank, Professor of Government, Cornell University A remarkably far-ranging meditation on the promises and problems of constitutional foundings. Bernal treats us to a journey across time, space, and states. In doing so, she not only reveals the importance of foundational ideas for constructing power and a 'we, the people', but she also provokes us to consider how different generations and groups continue to confront and shape these core ideas. --Elizabeth Beaumont, author of The Civic Constitution: Civic Visions and Struggles in the Path Toward Constitutional Democracy This is an extraordinarily lucid and elegantly written book, tackling one of the most difficult issues of political thought: what constitutes the 'founding' of a polity? Why are those dates, acts, documents given authority and legitimacy? Bernal disputes the foundationalist philosophy that underlies such views of founding and proposes instead the view of foundings as 'partially authorized beginnings, ' that can always be contested across time by the excluded and marginalized. This work enlightens us about the principles of democratic theory and practice. --Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University
