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support any of Rousseau‘s ideas, even as he exposes as spurious Yan‘s own attacks on them.
6
Rather, I see Zhang using Rousseau to re-examine a longstanding debate in Chinese thought
between what, following Rousseau, was now called the ―naturally given‖ (天賦之) and the
―manmade‖ (人造之) . By drawing an explicit link between these issues and the purposes and
capacities of the political realm, Rousseau‘s Social Contract helps Zhang to think through what
is within the scope of humans (separately as individuals, or aggregated as polities) to achieve
politically.
Zhang begins his essay by explaining, contra Yan‘s slight mischaracterization, that
Rousseau‘s ideas of freedom and equality are not descriptions of an irrefutable reality but instead
are normative prescriptions for political association. Zhang goes on to defend the empirical
possibility of a spontaneous contract arising from a state of warfare, mainly by pointing out that
others (including Thomas Hobbes and the Tang dynasty thinker Liu Zongyuan) have drawn the
same conclusion from available evidence (ZQJ, 21-22). Against Yan and Liang, both of whom
see the social contract as brokering agreements between collectives (usually states, 國), Zhang
insists, following Rousseau (I.4), that ‗the contract is between individuals‖ (ZQJ 23).
This devolution to individual choice for Zhang is linked primarily to the inefficacy, rather
than the bold illegitimacy, of force as a foundation for political association, but it also
foreshadows his response to the legitimation problem. For Zhang, the tension between
Rousseauian ―will‖ and ―force‖ seems to map a tension between innate capacity, on the one hand,
and the contingencies of external, structural influence, on the other. When Yan interprets the
fragility of human infants as evidence that they possess no naturally given freedom, and the
6
In fact, Zhang explicitly distances himself from Rousseau when he insists from the very beginning that he is not a
supporter of Rousseau‘s theory of republicanism, discussion of which Zhang fears can easily result in ―empty
speculation‖ (19). Although most commentators on Zhang‘s work take this essay as an instance of Zhang‘s
commitment to liberal rights (e.g., Lam 2002; Weston 1998), I argue that Zhang‘s ―defense‖ of Rousseau simply
points out that Rousseau‘s claims are reasonable (though contestable) given certain conditions.
Convention