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perpetually subject to contestation and ―re-founding,‖ these theorists argue, is how and on what
grounds power invoked in the name of the community can be constrained without appeal to a
transcendent principle (Arendt 1965, 170). Founding stands as a motif of the circularity of
politics, specifically the ongoing contestation of authority, rather than a moment of real action
(e.g., Honig 1991; Olson 2007). Founding narratives like those of Locke and Rousseau are
thereby rendered not blueprints for polity-building but stylized lessons about the inescapable
circularity of all political action.
Yet in a world in which democracy and rule of law are simultaneously uncontested (at
least publicly) as supreme political values but remain among the most difficult of all political
institutions to establish permanently, the negotiation of legitimacy in mature regimes does not
seem to loom nearly as large as does Zhang‘s more literal founding dilemma: how can we—or
I—get a particular kind of regime off the ground in the first place? Even if ordinary political
action in mature regimes does resemble the paradoxical task of ―founding,‖ not all acts of
founding exhibit the characteristics of ordinary political actions. Founding acts are not always in
medias res interventions that can draw upon already-existing political habits, institutions or
public figures for their efficacy. Zhang‘s political theory draws attention to the fact that
founding acts must first constitute power before authority becomes intelligible as a problem; they
must foster a shared consciousness of self-rule before collective self-determination is even
possible. These very real paradoxes of Zhang‘s founding moment cannot be dismissed as
ahistorical tropes, elements of post-hoc political myths designed to efface inaugural violence or
to justify particular political positions. A circular basis for founding—in which the right people
and the right institutions are seen always as mutually constitutive, rather than one being
Convention