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Doctrine speaks, in other words, are held to be specific people (Wen, Wu, and their selected
ministers) with specific talents (for administering government efficiently and with a sense of
moral purpose). No ―popular‖ agents (―masses,‖ or 民) are invoked; rulership is confined to men
of exceptional purpose who (presumably) are the only ones capable of setting a government in
motion.
The Doctrine‘s celebration of top-down political establishment seems to mimic
Rousseau‘s account of a benevolent lawgiver, but the exceptional persons who ―raise
government‖ in this narrative do not leave once the task of founding is accomplished. Bonnie
Honig suggests that the exit of Rousseau‘s lawgiver links to a persistent image in Western
narratives of a ―foreign founder,‖ whose unique potency for founding polities (especially
democratic polities) also threatens them once they are established. Whether it be Dorothy from
the Wizard of Oz or the Biblical Moses, founders who liberate peoples or establish law for them
also implicitly deny that those people can do the same for themselves. When the founder leaves
voluntarily, he helps to expunge from the people‘s memory their own political impotence; when
he is cast out, the newly-governed can both disavow their own capacities for violent founding
and deny that some acts must be undemocratic to be effective (Honig 2001, 23-40).
In the Doctrine case, however, the very purpose of Wen and Wu as founders is to remain
solidly within the structures they have created and to thereby begin transmitting; they mark ―the
wooden tablets and the bamboo strips‖ so that their practices—which the Doctrine identifies
with the very beginning not just of a particular polity, but of government itself—can be
perpetuated. It is precisely by means of their ongoing interventions in politics that ―the
government stands firm‖ and becomes like ―an easily-growing rush.‖ This founding narrative
Convention