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make self-rule possible? Why wasn‘t elite-led, top-down reform effective in fostering
democratic practice among China‘s masses—and what was the alternative? How can taking
political action make sense as ―political‖ before the communities that could underwrite or
legitimate such action exist?
In asking these questions, Zhang broached the fundamental tensions of founding self-
ruling regimes. He recognized that certain personal and collective qualities needed for successful
self-rule in a political community—qualities such as autonomy, intersubjective recognition of
citizenship, and collective identity—seem to have a character such that their establishment
requires acts different from, and often contradictory to, those that constitute their subsequent
practice. At the same time, he found top-down imposition—the usual response to paradoxes of
this kind—to be not only illegitimate but puzzlingly ineffective. Democracy and
constitutionalism, Zhang realized, were not simply ideas localized in individual minds, but ways
of life which required the spontaneous participation of an entire community to give their
institutional forms meaning and effective force. To make political arguments that at the same
time invoke rather than disavow the kind of society Zhang wished to bring into being, he
required a shared vocabulary, a language of common purposes and ends, that did not yet exist.
Zhang had to found this set of shared practices and language even as he realized the incapacity of
himself, or any one person, to do so.
Confronted with these paradoxes, Zhang frames the tensions of founding in an
importantly different way than do many contemporary political theorists, who use founding
narratives not to illumine the events that establish polities but to underscore the recurring
problems of ordinary political action. In most of the political communities of the modern West,
―founding‖ as an inaugural, polity-establishing event is no longer relevant. What remains
Convention