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removes these issues from a timeless, pre-political milieu and returns their (never-complete)
resolution to democratic, participatory arenas (ibid.) These theorists are right to emphasize that
the novelty of founding is not a characteristic exclusive to it, and that founding narratives can
offer conceptual resources to work through the everyday political interventions that orient
democratic communities to new directions.
But although portraying founding as an intervention into an already-existing contest has
important and perhaps damaging implications for the liberal project, such an interpretation
cannot be applied to founding in real historical time without displacing the real work it must do.
Only by reading all self-ruling polities as mature, well-established communities can political
self-sufficiency be endowed by an already existing historical acceptance of the regime, and only
from the perspective of Euro-Atlantic political experience can such a view ever make sense.
Founding on this account loses the paradoxical edge that made it useful as a model for sustaining
action in the first place, and becomes simply another instance in which Western political theory
solves problems only for itself. Zhang‘s formulation turns instead to investigating how the
internal struggle of individuals can be influenced by external environments without being
reduced to them. The chapters that follow explain how Zhang elaborates this vision of founding
in terms of meaningful practice; how he extends the logic of his founding to apply to acts that
sustain as much as inaugurate; and how he reads interpersonal accommodation of differences as
integral to building a coherent yet internally diverse polity.
Zhang‘s exploration of founding actions has not solved, once and for all, the problem of
who acts and how they act effectively, so much as identified a new tension of political action that
displaces the one between individual imposition and community identity or agency (tensions that
animate the founding narratives of Rousseau, Honig, Pitkin, and others). This tension, as I see it,
Convention