What does it take to found a new state? The abstract thought experiments of social theorizing tend to suggest a collective choice: a people deliberates, agrees on a social contract that best embodies its values, and then instantiates the appropriate social and institutional forms. The stakes are high. Choose wrong, and the people’s posterity will suffer from unfairness, depredation, or chaos. Choose wisely, they will have a chance at justice, social harmony, and order.

Such consideration makes for a stimulating, and often genuinely illuminating, exercise. But it simply breezes by the contingency and fundamental strangeness of real-life foundings, which often bear no resemblance to this rational progression. How exactly do people become “a people,” and what does it mean for them to choose together? How should they begin formal deliberations, given they are creating something new rather than operating under previously accepted rules? Why should the members of the group accept a particular leader to organize or preside over such deliberations?

Such questions create what Cornell political scientist Richard Bensel calls the “opening dilemma.” From a logical or legalistic perspective, Bensel argues that there can be no satisfactory answers to these conundrums. And yet, nation-states are founded. Leaders find ways to assume the mantle of the general will and simultaneously supply the people with an identity and a new state that will serve a “transcendent social purpose” integral to that identity. If they succeed at this task, which generally requires harnessing the masses’ emotions rather than satisfying any rigorous demands for reason or coherence, the leaders of the new state will simply bypass the practical difficulties that might otherwise be insurmountable. But to do this, they must use the cultural materials at hand. If the people lack a sense of unity, it is unlikely they can be talked into it. Offering an alien, artificial, or simply uninspiring purpose will leave them hopelessly mired in the opening dilemma.

Onto this basic conceptual skeleton, Bensel’s idiosyncratic but compelling new book, The Founding of Modern States, puts a generous helping of historical and analytical meat by sequentially taking up six foundings: England (from “time out of mind” through the Glorious Revolution of 1688), the USA (1774–89), France (1789–94), the Soviet Union (1917–18), the Third Reich (1933), and the Islamic Republic of Iran (1979). Each of these discussions is a miniature education in statecraft, rich with detail and full of conversation with authors from Hume to Arendt to contemporary historians and political scientists, often in blocky footnotes.

Appreciating Bensel’s achievement requires zooming out from the individual chapters and regarding the commonalities between foundings. Without any hope of doing justice to every part of the book, let us consider a few of its main themes.

Choosing the Moment

Foundings are tightly tied up with revolutions—but Bensel makes it very clear that they are not simply two sides of the same coin. As he puts it, “A revolution decisively rejects the legitimacy of the ruling regime in the name of an alternative transcendent social purpose; a founding melds that purpose with a new state’s right to rule.”

England, of course, had a Revolution, but not one that spawned a lasting state; Oliver Cromwell receives but a few sentences in Bensel’s account. Instead, the English people and the English constitutional monarchy grew up together, with moments like the adoption of Magna Carta simply affirming rights Englishmen regarded (even in 1215) as enduring from “time out of mind.” Even the Glorious Revolution emphasized continuity despite decisively establishing Parliament as the supreme authority in the state (with the concept of “the King-in-Parliament” smoothing over the conceptual disruption), so much so that that body “now sits as a constitutional convention whenever it convenes as a legislative body.” Parliament’s possession of overbearing formal authority, coupled with the English state’s dedication to protecting the historically-constituted rights of Englishmen, has peculiarly “elevated history to the position of guarantor” in English politics. Can we say that England had a founding at all, then? Bensel admits there was no “founding moment,” but nevertheless finds it instructive to trace how English thinkers have turned to various more-or-less mythic aspects of their people’s history in seeking to legitimate the modern version of their state.

In each of the other five foundings examined, however, revolutionaries seize on contingency to break up the ancien regime. Notwithstanding Bensel’s description, their purposes don’t always seem so transcendent at all, and their backward-looking unleashing of grievances is much easier to pull off than the more imaginative, future-oriented founding act. In the initial throwing off of the old order, empty slogans bridge profound differences. In America in the 1770s, a newly assertive Parliament threatened the colonists’ sense that their rights as Englishmen were sacrosanct. In France in 1789 and Russia in 1917, famine played a leading role in delegitimizing the rulers among the mass of the people. In Iran in 1979, years of repression by the Shah caused members of nearly all classes to regard the Western-backed ruler as unjust. In the Weimar Republic, the permanent overhang of the Treaty of Versailles left Germans feeling oppressed, while a surge of communist activity encouraged “a kind of revolutionary adventurism” in the country’s politics.

In each of these cases, the opponents of the old regime quickly discover that successfully toppling the old regime does not amount to establishing a legitimate state to take its place. Doing that requires grappling with who “the people” really are, and how the new government will live up to their aspirations. Bensel persuasively demonstrates that this next stage is not about aggregating values or polling the public to discern their wishes, because the very question of whose preferences should be treated as worthy is open to redefinition. If “no true Scotsman” is usually a fallacy, foundings are in some large part about contesting what it means to be a “true Frenchman” or a “true German.” Although many of the French revolutionaries originally hoped for a constitutional monarchy, this more liberal element eventually lost out to brothers-in-arms who favored a radical Rousseaian equality that made it impossible for Louis XVI to be included among the ranks of Frenchmen. Reborn as Citizen Louis Capet, this formerly royal personage might be included—but, in the event, the equality he was privileged to enjoy was only that of the guillotine. To be fair, a great many of the revolutionary leaders themselves ended by being “shaved by the national barber.”

The French case is especially illustrative of how allies of convenience in the revolution end up as mortal enemies once the task becomes defining the identity of the new state (and people). Bensel shows how an Enlightenment ideal and a romantic egalitarian ideal battled for the soul of France, with the egalitarians’ embrace of “direct popular insurgency”—street violence in Paris—giving them a decisive advantage. The followers of Rousseau belittled all representational intermediation of the people’s will, instead insisting that the people’s spontaneous instinct must be decisive, even as they learned to manipulate the people’s outpourings of emotion. If, in pre-modern days, an aspirant to the throne could sometimes win out simply because he was the “man on the spot,” the people of Paris could dictate the direction of the revolution simply because they were there, and their provincial counterparts were not. Their influence crescendoed when the sans-culottes bodily invaded the National Convention in the summer of 1793, eventually arresting Girondin legislators who dared to defy them and installing Maximilien Robespierre as a democratic despot governing in their name.

Democratic and Non-Democratic Foundings

Given the similarities between the book’s last four cases, one might fairly wonder whether Bensel might have ended up with a more focused book if he confined his attention entirely to foundings featuring totalizing ambitions, notwithstanding the fact that he is usually an Americanist. But the author himself insists there is no hard-and-fast difference between democratic and non-democratic foundings. In both cases, the midwives to the new state must find ways of bypassing the opening dilemma, which “democracy,” as a procedural value, has no ability to solve. Leaders in both kinds of foundings must do more than they are officially sanctioned to do.

This way of thinking leads to some unlikely, but somehow satisfying, rhymes. America’s constitutional framers, Bensel says, discarded the Articles of Confederation “as so much waste paper and began to draw up plans for an entirely new government,” trusting that the American people’s esteem for their mostly non-radical constitution would override the inconvenient fact that their ratification scheme was made up out of whole cloth. Compare that to the moment in the midst of the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. When a constitution drafted over the summer, based on the country’s disregarded 1906 constitution, became controversial, the revolution’s leaders turned to an elected Assembly of Experts to revise it. This 73-member body, composed mostly of clerics, followed in the footsteps of the Philadelphia founders before them by “basically start[ing] from scratch” and producing “an almost entirely new document.” In a December referendum, 99 percent of voters approved this document, notwithstanding its unauthorized novelties.

Both democratic and authoritarian states may rely on post-facto public ratification of founding decisions, but such events can make only a modest contribution to the essential ingredient: “a mythological conception of the will of the people, including a belief that that will can be revealed only through a properly conceived and performed political practice.” Any founding must be careful in how the public is asked to manifest its consent for the new regime, since agenda-setting and the determination of electoral qualifications are likely to predetermine the outcome. Both democrats and budding totalitarians want to harness the real will of the real people, as opposed to some counterfeit produced by misunderstanding or subversion, and both realize that voters, left to their own devices, will not arrive at satisfying institutional solutions.

What differentiates the two types of states, in Bensel’s view, is “the degree to which they insist on refining that will after the state has been founded.” The choice for ongoing democracy is, in part, an admission of imperfection on the part of democratic founders, who concede that the will of the people cannot be distilled so perfectly as to settle the important questions for all time. Consequently, the state must seek periodic direction from the people through elections, as imperfect as those may themselves be. Non-democratic founders, on the other hand, offer their people a truly transcendent vision of their place in history, which can only be realized by deference to the newly established authority, uniquely capable of serving the people’s true interests and fulfilling their destiny. Bensel claims that for both kinds of founders, the people’s imperfections necessitate a certain amount of benign manipulation. Going further, he rather startling observes, “It is just that some of these manipulations grate more harshly on our own Western sensibilities than others.” Really?

From the first pages of his book, Bensel makes clear that his project is not a normative one; although he disdains the over-mathematization of his discipline, he nevertheless thinks of himself as offering a positivist social scientific account that avoids questions of how a constitution “should” be constructed or what it should say. When he considers legitimacy, it is through the lens of what people will endorse and endure, rather than relative to some external standard of political morality. His willingness to engage with political ideas that are totally impermissible within the confines of our own democratic political culture must be reckoned a strength of the project.

That said, to return to Bensel’s pronouncement about “our own Western sensibilities,” it is also a real limitation. At some point, one has to ask whether certain universal facts about the nature of man make totalitarian states inherently unstable—whether it is simply too credulously relativistic to take their claims on the level. If they turned out to be “compelling” enough to win over the beleaguered Russian people of 1918 or German people of 1933 or Iranians of 1979, we ought to ask whether their means of “compelling” fealty and obedience once in power are compatible with the human spirit.

Specifically, we should wonder whether the thoroughgoing anti-pluralism that each of these states espoused can really be sustained. Bensel does great work in showing just how self-conscious the non-democratic actors were in their aspiration to eradicate divisions in society. He quotes Hermann Göring as declaring that, now that Germans were united under Hitler’s leadership, “Every difference is wiped away. … Finally, the idea of the national community rises above the ruins of the bankrupt liberal-capitalist state.” Of course, understanding the needs of that community would ultimately be the leader’s own responsibility, to be fulfilled through his instinctive feel for the destiny of the race. The Ayatollah, too, premised his leadership on the idea that submission to God’s laws would overcome divisions among Islamic peoples caused by Western imperialism and Zionism. By turning political obedience into a theological injunction, Khomeini framed his opponents as “apostates” properly “dealt with according to the religious code of sin.”

Because of his focus on the challenges of bypassing the opening dilemma, Bensel is mostly impressed by the rhetorical force of these moves. But we should hasten to ask: doesn’t this necessarily make for a bad system of government? Mustn’t the desire to suppress all differences hobble a state’s ability to deal with the challenges of governance, given the limits of the vision of a leader who will inevitably find himself surrounded by sycophants?

Put another way: Bensel teaches us how the belief in a people’s “historic mission” can generate enough enthusiasm to get a founding over the hump, but he doesn’t much consider whether a sincere belief in such a mission will inevitably bring down states founded on this basis over the long run. He does give us a hint that this could be the case, observing that founders who espouse a world-historical mission are likely to see the states they are creating as inherently too modest vessels for the fulfillment of the people’s destiny, and therefore put a need for international expansion into the DNA of the new state. Conversely, democratic founders whose goals are more limited are more likely to see the achievement of a well-defined state as worthy in and of itself. It would have been interesting for Bensel to consider, even in passing, how this lesson applies to some other modern countries, such as the People’s Republic of China, India, or Israel, or even to obviously peripheral players such as Kosovo.

Notwithstanding this downside of non-democratic foundings, in the book’s final paragraph Bensel raises a disturbing possibility: perhaps, in the contemporary world, it is only non-democratic founders who arm themselves with myths potent enough to overcome the opening dilemma. In democracies, meanwhile, “the entire apparatus of intellectual and scientific culture seems to be dedicated to exposing [myths and abstract beliefs] as fantasies,” which may mean that “we have exhausted this paradigm” in the modern world.

By closing with this foreboding, Bensel finally lets the normative camel get its nose under the tent. Perhaps democracies need to take the requirement of crafting their own mythologies more seriously—but our very reverence for the social scientific mindset and its demythologizing tendency could render that impossible. Given our limited ability to give our hearts over to new organizing principles, we ought to face up to the precariousness of democratic societies in the contemporary world—to realize that we need to conserve what we have, rather than fantasizing about modern refoundings of some sort. There is the disturbing possibility that, unlike our forebears, we would never make it out of the starting gate.