8
Before going on to consider Zhang‘s response to this seeming paradox, including his own
reading of Rousseau, it may be helpful to survey how contemporary Anglophone theorists have
interpreted the paradox of founding as a means of redirecting its central concerns. Rousseau‘s
extrapolitical solution of a Lawgiver draws attention to the difficulties of truncating what are
ultimately the ―chicken-and-egg‖ dilemmas that, in the view of many contemporary theorists,
mark all action in self-ruling regimes. On the basis of these similarities, Rousseau‘s narrative
has been appropriated to unravel the problems of founding that seem to recur daily even in
mature democracies.
2
Founding, Legitimacy and Action
Rousseau‘s influential statement of the founding problem identifies one of the primary
issues at stake as the creation not of people as individuals with particular characteristics, but of
―a people‖ as a cohesive group, whose members self-identify with both the group and each other.
Contemporary theorists have come increasingly to recognize that, speaking realistically, the
people as a group is never consistently present when political actions are taken, and its consent is
never fully acquired. It must therefore be called into being whenever, as in everyday political
interventions, individuals take actions in its name—creating a paradox akin to that Rousseau
characterized as a pre-political problem (Keenan 2003, 11-13). Because self-ruling regimes in
principle are meant to embody widely shared, collective aims, political action within such
regimes must assume that certain commitments to self-ruling practices exist already by a body of
2
―Every day,‖ Honig points out, ― new citizens are born, and still others immigrate into established regimes. Every
day, already socialized citizens mistake, depart from, or simply differ about the commitments of democratic
citizenship. Every day, democracies resocialize, capture, or reinterpellate citizens into their political institutions and
culture in ways those citizens do not freely will, nor could they‖ (Honig 2007, 3).
Convention