29
suggests that political ―foundations‖ lie in the ―persons‖ that enliven government rather than in
the rulers who commandeer it, he heralds a new form of political action in which the both the
moral legitimacy of democratic rule, and the materially efficacious power incurred by the polity
acting together, flow through the individual citizen.
18
Paradoxically, then, the union of
legitimacy and efficacious power represented by democratic founding is first performed not
when collectives act together, but when the individual acts to align the external world with his
inner moral insight. As Zhang points out in an essay exploring why the 1914 provisional
constitution failed to take effect, the stability of this new political arrangement lies not ―simply in
promulgating a draft and going through however many formalities and then declaring, ‗it is
stable, it is stable.‘ It must be something every person in the country must tend toward,
something they must feel that they can entrust their lives and property to without fear‖ (ZQJ 523;
italics mine). Insertion of the ―self‖ into democratic life, then, means that individuals act for
commonly shared ends, but they do so separately; they do not act ―together‖ to transform their
socio-political environment.
This counter-intuitive model of democratic action can be rendered sensible when seen
through the lens of triangular authority that Metzger describes above. For Zhang, the will of
each individual perpetually calls into being the source of political legitimacy, because even if the
―people‖ now occupies the normative position of the ―cosmos‖ to legitimate political rule, it is
each individual who acts to mediate and criticize the normative whole toward which his or her
capacities are oriented. Combined with the notions of sagely founding as transmissive, these
dispersed acts motivated by critical distance suggest that Zhang‘s founding takes in multiple
18
Zhang‘s concern for legitimacy here reflects a widespread assumption among many late Qing and early
Republican intellectuals that Western democratic concepts and institutions were important not only because they
secured ―wealth and power,‖ as Benjamin Schwartz‘s (1964) influential account would have it, but also because
they enabled particular kinds of moral practices (see Chang 1987).
Convention