Origin Stories in Political Thought: Discourses on Gender, Power, and Citizenship

Abstract

Origin Stories in Political Thought: Discourses on Gender, Power, and Citizenship. By Joanne H. Wright. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 260p. $50.00.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).