Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao

Through The Tiger, he joined the debates on a major question of the era--that of "how to incorporate a notion of the people as their own rulers in a territory with no historical precedent for democracyâ[euro] (p. 32). Zhang's notion of self-awareness as a mode of political action predates the impact of romantic individualism of the May Fourth movement, when the debate over a "lack of selfâ[euro] in Chinese culture really got under way. Ambivalence and equivocation thus seem stamped on the whole endeavor at one minute, but in the next all doubt is swept aside, and epistemological and ethical optimism hold sway. [...]as noted above, Zhang believed that the capacity for founding acts was "diffused through societyâ[euro] (p. 27).