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Wolin‘s choice of words is revealing: sometimes, certain acts of seeing supplement the world;
they are visions brought to, rather than drawn from, the existing worldly reality of the potential
political community.
Zhang‘s redescription of founding acts does mean to ascribe impossible autonomy to
singular, founding individuals. It simply indicates a framework by which individuals can act
independently of currently-existing political ideals and realities, without denying that what
makes such aloofness possible may be traceable to equally embedded, idiosyncratic experiences
within or outside the political community itself. The sages of the Doctrine narrative, in fact, are
efficacious founders because they transcend the dichotomy of ordinary and exceptional. They are
both ordinary enough to remain functional members of their communities long after the founding
moment, but exceptional enough to discern and act independently upon orders that do not
already exist. To found is to be exemplary in a resonant but unique and hitherto unprecedented
way.
Such idiosyncratic insight exists always, but its recognition as a source of politically
potent leverage does not. The centrality of idiosyncrasy, or what Zhang in other essays theorizes
as ―difference‖ (異), goes far toward resolving the tensions between mass and elite that marked
all political action in the Republican period, because idiosyncrasy need not rely on elite action
for either its inauguration or its imitation. It can be both initiated and witnessed at all levels of
society. The radical reflexivity of foundational concepts such as ―self-awareness‖ and the self-
use of talent, which are explored further in later chapters, play such an important role in his
political theory because he realizes that an essential feature of those institutions appropriate to
constitutional and republican rule lies in particular ways of being and acting, on the part not only
of elites but of ordinary people. These broad, socially dispersed capacities for founding are
Convention