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arenas and at different times by an uncoordinated plurality of individuals, each striving in
perhaps idiosyncratic ways to align themselves with a vision of order—a vision informed this
time not by cosmological patterns or Heavenly mandate, but by intuitions about what will and
will not resonate with fellow citizens. True to the neo-Confucian model of legitimacy, founding
individuals read the interpretation of democracy as their personal responsibility, realizing that the
very attempt to call it into being requires dedication to external community-building amid what
is necessarily a plurality of other interpretations. At best, founders simply set-into-motion, but
this transmissive notion allows for multiple founders because it allows for multiple foundings,
not only in political but also in social, cultural and educational spheres. Unlike the instantaneous
transformations of Rousseau‘s Lawgiver, Zhang‘s aims are more incremental and demand no
spontaneous consensus on a set of institutions that define community identity. As such, these
foundings are more openly participatory and less violent than the top-down interventions that
characterize many founding accounts.
19
Zhang‘s point is not that a democratic people should
―bootstrap‖ its way into legitimacy (as in Olson 2007), but that interpretations of legitimacy can
―bootstrap‖ individuals into a democratic people. To be effective in creating the order they
promised, these interpretations of democratic legitimacy must be resonant; and if they are
resonant, they will be legitimate.
By reading founding not as a singular event but as a set of plural activities that may
happen either instantaneously or in sequence, and at a pace set not by an external demand but by
the ongoing efforts that both motivate and constitute them, Zhang in a way recreates the
spontaneous, organic unity to which many thinkers at the time ascribed British proclivities for
self-rule, freedom and peaceful accommodation of political dissent. The political projects of the
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I am indebted to Emily Nacol for pointing out the importance of the temporal dimension to Zhang‘s non-coercive
politics.
Convention