24
government lies in people‖ suggests that the problem of founding is to find prime movers that
will set into motion some kind of society-wide, and trans-temporal, transformation. To Hanna
Pitkin, the resonance necessary for all such inaugural action implies an already-existing
community whose collective values are the empirical and normative basis for further effective
action: ―No leader stands in relation to his followers as a craftsman to material, imposing form
on inanimate matter. He must always deal with people who already have customs, habits, needs,
beliefs, rules of conduct, who already live somewhere in some manner‖ (Pitkin 1984, 99). By
suggesting that founders ―transmit‖ rather than create ex nihilo, Zhang seems to endorse this
circular notion of political action, rejecting in the process founding narratives that pivot on the
historical or normative priority of either individuals or political institutions.
13
But what kinds of actions can be taken in situations of extreme political fragmentation, in
which creating a community turns on motivating disparate individuals to take action in ways that
are not directly resonant with any already-existing environment? The transmission performed by
the Doctrine‘s sage kings—and, by extension, implied in Zhang‘s allusion to them—seems to
signal a different kind of political intervention, the constitutive components of which are not
spontaneous consent or episodic resistance but resonance and exemplariness. These
extraordinary individuals act by setting a law that is binding not because it is an expression of
universal reason or consent, but because it is an exemplary act that compels through its virtue,
however imperfectly the full contours of that virtue may be captured in extant written words.
14
The Doctrine develops earlier themes found in the Analects of Confucius as well as the text
13
Sheldon Wolin and Jill Frank join Pitkin in embracing an idea of political action as a circular and self-
perpetuating activity that privileges neither individual efforts nor institutional influences, but instead draws forth
new possibilities from the interaction of both (Frank 2005; Wolin 1994; Pitkin 1998, 1981).
14
Zhu Xi explicitly laments these omissions in his preface to the Doctrine. In fact, it was precisely the inability of
words to convey this virtue that Chinese exegetical practices often emphasized oral transmission (especially through
the teacher-student relationship).
Convention