By Leigh K. Jenco
Democratic political thought frequently sees collective motion because the foundation for non-coercive social switch, assuming that its phrases and practices are constantly self-evident and obtainable. yet what if we discover ourselves in occasions the place collective motion isn't instantly to be had, or perhaps largely intelligible? This ebook examines essentially the most intellectually sizeable and influential chinese language thinkers of the early 20th century, Zhang Shizhao (1881-1973), who insisted that it's people who needs to 'make the political' earlier than social activities or self-aware political groups have materialized. Zhang attracts from British liberalism, democratic concept, and late-Imperial Confucianism to formulate new roles for potent person motion on own, social, and institutional registers. within the approach, he bargains a imaginative and prescient of neighborhood that turns now not on spontaneous consent or convergence on a shared objective, yet on ongoing acts of exemplariness that inaugurate new, unpredictable contexts for powerful own motion.
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Additional info for Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao
Sample text
26 Making the Political and about those who continued to think within its categories, was its conflation of ethical virtue with the capacity to effect political good – a logical fallacy that he explicitly blames on Confucianism (ZQJ 181). Moral goodness does not always result in political efficacy, Zhang realizes, and being “selfless” in the way many contemporary political leaders recommended often resulted in sacrificing oneself not for the greater good but for the power plays of political elites.
For example, Zhang explicitly defended British parliamentarism against the American-style presidential system promoted by Sun Yat-sen (ZQJ 104–127). The paradigmatic examples here are Rawls, Political Liberalism, and Pettit, Republicanism. Making the political 23 here. Zhang’s more salient concern is promoting citizen involvement in polity-building, given the absence of even minimal consensus, stable political signs, and social cohesion in the nascent Chinese Republic. These are primarily problems of founding, and they implicate him more closely in democratic discourses about the nature and sites of political action than in liberal or republican discourses about the promotion of liberty.
He saw his own work as an important corrective to particular Confucian tenets embodied in the institutional apparatus of the late empire, particularly those which in his view conflated loyalty to the emperor with loyalty to the Chinese political community as a whole, and those that effectively invalidated both the agency and the contributions of the common people. 36 Zhang does so by emphasizing the legitimacy of an enlightened selfinterest, developing concepts such as “talent” and “self-awareness” that bear strong resemblances to late imperial critiques of the “public good” made by Huang Zongxi (1610–1695), Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), Dai Zhen (1724–1777), and others.