Institutions, individuals, and political change: The political theory of Zhang Shizhao

How can our shared humanly created environment be effectively transformed to make it better, less confining, more tractable to our control? Political theories of republicanism and democracy assume that citizen action taken in concert is uniquely efficacious in transforming both the behavior of individual citizens and the community they share. This dissertation examines the cross-cultural political theory of Zhang Shizhao (1880-1973) to argue that other options for efficacious action are available. Zhang thought and wrote at a time of unprecedented fragmentation, and in a place that lacked indigenous practices of democracy. His central question was thus how individual effort can influence the socio-political environment independently of prior agreement on common purposes, and how if at all such effort can culminate in democratic political community.; Zhang theorizes a close link between individual effort and polity-building, a stance his contemporaries called "rule by man," but he departs sharply from Chinese contemporaries by upholding plurality rather than a unitary public good as the basis for a polity. Although his respect for political difference was inspired by British liberal thought, Zhang traces the path from imperial to democratic government by modifying imperial Confucian categories, which read efficacious actions as irreducibly individual attempts at world-ordering. Zhang elaborates three kinds of individual activities that build from internal self-work to transform external environments: "Self-awareness" (zijue) is the realization by individuals that their actions and mental orientations can constitute the foundation for wider socio-political change. The "self-use of talent" (zi yong cai) encourages individuals to transform their external environments to better suit their capacities. Finally, "accommodation of differences" (tiaohe) builds commonality by situating these latter two activities within incrementally negotiated interpersonal relationships, rather than the a priori public space that for many theorists of plurality forms the basis for resistance to imposed authority.; Zhang interrogates, rather than assumes, the nature of political community and its role in solving problems. He theorizes action for those times and places when collective effort is unavailable, explaining how individual effort can be rendered meaningful even as it remains embedded within circumstances and institutions beyond the capacity of any one individual to control.