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maintains the integrity of the ―political realm‖: the public/private distinction. The tension
between ―inner‖ cultivation and ―outer‖ world-ordering that runs throughout Zhang‘s thought
helps him to draw attention to the wide range of transformative individual actions that are taken
neither in deliberate concert with others nor completely independently of them. Zhang‘s model
ultimately suggests that certain practices central to democracy, including egalitarian participation,
can be instituted without reference to public-private divides at all. In the process, he alerts us to
further locations for political action that the categories of public and private obscure, and to the
activities they categorically constrain by deeming them too limited in effect.
Although the context of unprecedented political, cultural and social breakdown in which
Zhang wrote prompted him to interrogate the assumptions, prominent in much contemporary
political theory, that already-existing communities must underwrite individual political action,
the application of his insights is not limited simply to situations of political fragmentation.
Zhang‘s theorization of political action draws attention to an often overlooked problem in
political theory: namely, how individuals may act efficaciously and non-coercively before
collective action with others on however minimal a shared goal is likely or possible. His
investigations of the incremental steps that take place between individual and collective action—
whether as a means of invigorating public space, changing shared environments, or building
institutions where none existed before—challenge much of the received knowledge about what
forms political action and political space can take in self-ruling regimes. By acting on their local
environments, revising their inner visions, working through their inner struggles, confronting the
demands, feelings, and talents of others, and most importantly, convincing themselves that their
actions, however incremental and small, matter to global outcomes, individuals can harness their
own uncertain power before—and sometimes as a prerequisite to—joining together with others.
Convention