39
attention to the strong resemblances between Zhang‘s idea of ―self-awareness‖ and the practices
of moral and political mediation that constituted political authority under the Chinese empire.
Building on the analysis of founding I developed above, I detail what for Zhang are the first steps
in taking political action: not the bridging of gaps between oneself and others for the purposes of
concerted action, but overcoming the disparity between the world one envisions internally with
the reality one faces externally. I use this model of action to challenge explicitly the circularity of
accounts like Hanna Pitkin‘s, which argue that only action in concert can be effective politically.
The internal retooling that begins with self-awareness takes concrete shape in the ―self-
use of talent,‖ and extends farther outward to include inter-subjective understanding and mutual
interpretation with the ―accommodation‖ of difference. In Chapter 4 I explain why ―talent‖ in
the Chinese context could be politically significant, and how its ―self-use‖ signals Zhang‘s
innovative refurbishment of imperial modes of rule for democratic purposes. By identifying the
―foundation‖ (本) of specifically democratic government in the ―self-use‖ (自用) of talent,
Zhang overtly repudiates traditional forms of governance in which the imperial center exercised
political control through the management and training of personnel. Whereas ―virtue,‖ the term
more commonly a focus of Chinese political reform, has been historically linked to a discernable
and unitary idea of the good, ―talent‖ manifest outside imperially sanctioned outlets had long
been associated with subversive cunning – especially on the part of females. The ―self-use‖ of
talent, then, unmoors talent from the ―virtues‖ that normalized its deployment, transforming
talent into an emblem of unpredictability and nonconformity.
The decisions required to ―use one‘s talent‖ do not involve negotiating the choices of
others, but overcoming the tension generated by one‘s inner moral directive, on the one hand,
and the external conditions and oppositions (including legal and political regimes and the actions,
Convention