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system of laws de novo. This could simply be done by force: ‗obey these laws or suffer the
consequences‘‖ (Olson 2007, 331).
For the most part, these approaches read founding as an always-existing problem whose
resolution motivates the real work of daily political action. It is probably true, after all, that the
work of building political structures and the individual characters that inhabit them is a circular
one, because institutions and characters are themselves mutually constituted and reciprocal
(Frank 2005, 1, 11). Founding as an actual, polity-establishing event, then, is a ―myth‖ (or, in
Honig‘s Derridan vocabulary, a ―fable‖)—valuable for its symbolic richness but not its
prescriptive design. All that remains is a story about how subsequent actions taken against
popular will can be legitimate. Paul Ricoeur realized this dilemma as both necessary yet
irresolvable; he called it ―the political paradox.‖ Founding myths are necessarily adduced from
contemporary reality; they are events that have never taken place, because it is in the very nature
of political legitimacy to be recoverable only in retrospection, after the community has been
united. ―Political thought proceeds from the state, to citizenship, to civism [i.e., the virtues of
citizenship] and not in the reverse order‖ (Ricoeur 1984, 252, 254).
The problem ―founding‖ typifies, then, is not so much about how to establish regimes as
about how to constitute authority—which, because it is continually contested in regimes of self-
rule, can be considered a recurring rather than an episodic problem. When ―founding‖ moments
are seen to perpetually occur in this way, they no longer appear as true beginnings. Rather, they
draw attention to the embedded nature of political actors whose interventions draw inevitably
from the ―always already‖ available political resources that community life affords (Pitkin 1984,
1998; Honig 2007). The paradoxes of founding are thereby assuaged by situating them in an
already-existing, self-ruling polis, in which authority is daily contested but the difficulty of
Convention