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For the best dissertation completed and accepted during 2006 or 2007 in the field of political philosophy.

Award Committee: Melissa A. Orlie, Chair, University of Illinois, Urbana; Sharon Krause, Brown University; Samuel Chambers, The Johns Hopkins University

Recipient: Leigh Kathryn Jenco, National University of Singapore

Dissertation Title: “Individuals, Institutions, and Political Change: The Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao”

Dissertation Chair: Jacob Levy, The University of Chicago

Citation: In this path-breaking dissertation, Leigh Jenco offers a study of the cross-cultural political theory of Zhang Shizhao (1880-1973) designed to illuminate central issues in contemporary political theory, above all political action. Previous studies of political action have tended to equate it with collective action, analyzing the ways that "action in concert" can transform the behavior of individuals and the communities they share.  Jenco, following Zhang, focuses instead on individual action. She shows that Zhang creatively synthesizes British liberal thought and Confucian categories to demonstrate how individual effort can influence the social and political environment independently of prior agreement on common purposes - yet with the hope of creating democratic political community. Zhang wrote at a time of unprecedented social fragmentation and in a place that lacked indigenous political practices of democracy. He therefore theorizes action for times and places when collective effort is unavailable, explaining how individual action can be rendered politically meaningful and efficacious even as it remains embedded in circumstances and institutions beyond the capacity of any one individual to control.

The committee was impressed by the theoretical and methodological originality of Jenco's dissertation as well as by the theoretical and political significance of its conclusions. Methodologically, Jenco learns from what Zhang does as well as from what he says. Like him, she proffers a model of comparative political thought which does not simply aim to learn about "the other" but to take seriously what the political theory of the other has to teach us about our own circumstances. Theoretically and politically, Jenco draws upon Zhang to challenge reigning assumptions about democracy, about public and private, and about political action in ways which have the potential to turn contemporary political theory in significant new directions.