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the inter-subjective ―accommodation‖ (調和) of difference—but each of these solutions hinges
on his responses to the paradoxes of founding. Theorizing within a tradition and to an audience
that did not produce self-ruling practices like those in Britain and America, Zhang tries to
explain how the individual self (己 or 我, the ―I‖) can perform both the constituting of the people
and the constituting of the government—indeed, must perform it, given the absence of
widespread agreement and of shared political norms. His ultimate solution suggests that political
action can be undertaken in a way that is effective without being impositional, and individualized
without being atomized.
The First Paradox of Founding: Mass Versus Elite
Zhang inhabited a world whose unprecedented political and cultural fragmentation
rendered unavailable the shared meanings that underwrite democratic political action. The
changes he sought were not immanent in his own traditions, and so could not be ―recovered‖ and
brought into the service of contemporary problems; but Western-style democratic norms could
not yet constitute shared bases for action either. He did not have the luxury of pretending as if
the Chinese, as a ―people,‖ already existed, or that this collection of over 400 million individuals
had all already ingested the concept of public space in which transformative political action
could be staged. Zhang‘s theorizing, in other words, must begin from either the not-yet or the
almost-gone.
Like other well-educated elites of the early republican period, Zhang confronted these
issues through the lens of another paradox, related to founding but not reducible to it.
Recognizing that political and social reform turned crucially on the character of the Chinese
masses, yet believing that the masses could not reform themselves, elites pondered how they
Convention