32
once these individuals of exceptional vision made their mark ―could Europe have the political
landscape it does today‖ (ZQJ 134).
20
Zhang‘s insistence that resonance, and hence social change, lies in widely dispersed
assertions of difference rather than the replication of values already widely shared dissolves
another paradox of founding, this one identified by Arthur Waley as specific to the Chinese case:
the ―disordered world can only be reformed by a sage; but so long as the world is disordered, no
sage can appear‖ (Waley 1956, 10, fn. 11). Zhang‘s model, however, points out that only in
disordered worlds that sages can appear because only in disordered worlds can order have
meaning and appeal. What sagely founding calls for, in fact, is an aloofness from the current
situation, an event of personal vision that temporally precedes acting upon the world even as it
makes action in the world possible. As Sheldon Wolin explains it (albeit in a very different
context),
The paradigm observer is not the man who sees and reports what all normal
observers see and report, but the man who sees in familiar objects what no one
else has seen before. Thus the world must be supplemented [by this individual‘s
perspective, her insight] before it can be understood and reflected upon (Wolin
1969, 1073).
20
Zhang asks his readers to regard the seven hundred years of British freedom under the Magna Carta not as a
rebuke, but as an inspiration: ―I simply want you to take that seven hundred year old dead man and use him as a
mirror to view yourselves, issuing forth just a little of his conscience and good nature (tianliang)…to make our
grandchildren, or our grandchildren‘s grandchildren, have something to cherish and look back on after more time
than that has gone by‖ (ZQJ 520).
Convention