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government." In fact, he noted that the "general psychology of the Chinese is that a man possessing marked ability should become king." Viewed in the most charitable way possible, such an impression of history for a twentieth-century revolutionary seems strangely incongruous. But incredibly enough, Sun was making such comments at the very moment when Ku Chieh-kang and others were making electrifying discoveries in Chinese historiography, one of the more exciting dimensions of the New Culture Movement of the 1920s. These revolutionary currents seem to have had little effect on Sun.
Sun Yat-sen also enjoys the distinction of having contributed a unique historical theory to historiography. One of his most ardent contemporary admirers has affirmed that of "all theories of history, the social interpretation of history" of Sun Yat-sen "seems to be most illustrative of the truth of social evolution, as revealed in the legends of ancient China."10 Yet this theory seems to be of rather minimal consequence. Drawing on ideas supplied by the American dentist, Maurice Williams, Sun is primarily at pains to set aside Marx's concept of class struggle. Williams contended that the struggle for subsistence is the law of social progress and the central force of history. From this, Sun reasoned that since the struggle for existence is the same thing as the problem of livelihood, "therefore the problem of livelihood can be said to be the driving force in social progress." With this insightful formula, Sun could now refute Marx, for class warfare was clearly not the cause of social progress. Sun could say that, conversely, since class warfare is the end product of the social disease caused by the inability to subsist, this made Marx a social pathologist, for he had concentrated upon the study of social disease, not the central element in social progress itself. However much such reasoning reveals Sun's basic humanitarian impulse, and certainly much of the rest of his writing on the subject of the People's Livelihood confirms this happy feature of Sun's personality, it presents an historical theory of but limited value.
In a similar theoretical vein, Sun also spoke briefly of universal political stages of history as traversed by mankind. These stages, the first being that of the great wilderness, the second of theocracy, and the third of autocracy, culminate in the fourth, which history has proved to be the best, democracy.12 This very loose set of generalizations is part of Sun's discussion of democracy itself, so