"A stunning achievement as the first full account of social science in a non-Western society. Barshay tells an epic story of how a handful of Japanese intellectuals used social science to make sense of the new society into which they were moving. What they did helps us understand not only Japan, but the whole modern world."—Robert Bellah, Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Tokugawa Religion and Imagining Japan

Andrew E. Barshay is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (California, 1988).

The Social Sciences in Modern Japan

The Marxian and Modernist TraditionsBy Andrew E. Barshay

University of California Press

Copyright © 2004 the Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-25381-0

Contents

Preface............................................................................................ixAcknowledgments....................................................................................xiii1. Social Science as History.......................................................................12. The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: An Overview................................................363. Doubly Cruel: Marxism and the Presence of the Past in Japanese Capitalism.......................724. Thinking through Capital: Uno Kozo and Marxian Political Economy................................925. School's Out? The Uno School Meets Japanese Capitalism..........................................1206. Social Science and Ethics: Civil Society Marxism................................................1757. Imagining Democracy in Postwar Japan: Maruyama Masao as a Political Thinker.....................197Conclusion.........................................................................................240Notes..............................................................................................257Bibliography.......................................................................................301Index..............................................................................................321

Chapter One

Social Science as History

What follows is a historical study of intellectuals and the social sciences, or better, of the intellectual as social scientist, in Japan from the 1890s roughly to the present. But I wish to begin with a Russian parable based on a minor character in a novel by Leo Tolstoy.

The novel is Anna Karenin, the character is Sergei Ivanich Koznyshev. Koznyshev is a city intellectual, a social type of whom Tolstoy was none too fond. Unlike his half-brother Konstantin Levin, Koznyshev takes the institution of the zemstvo land assembly seriously, even, on occasion, upbraiding the great landowner and spiritual pilgrim for ignoring his political responsibilities. This, we are shown, is somewhat unfair to Levin. Not only does Levin write a book on the problem of Russian agriculture-synonymous, in his view, with "the question" of peasant labor-but he also attempts to carry out his ideas on his own estate lands. For his part, Levin finds himself uncomfortable at Koznyshev's presence in the country. Koznyshev regards the country, or more specifically his half-brother's estate, as no more than a "valuable antidote to the corrupt influences of town," a place where he can be lazy. Real, intellectual life is possible only in the city, or in the country to the extent that it can be made a satellite of the city.

Levin is troubled by the effects of abstract thought on the personality of the intellectual:

Levin regarded his brother as a man of vast intellect and culture, as generous in the highest sense of the word and endowed with a special faculty for working for the public good. But in the depths of his heart, the older he grew and the more intimately he knew his brother, the oftener the thought struck him that this faculty for working for the public good, of which he was completely devoid, was perhaps not so much a quality as a lack ... of the vital force, of what is called heart, of the impulse that drives a man to choose some one out of all the innumerable paths of life and to care for that one only. The better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Koznyshev ... had reasoned out in [his mind] that it was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this supposition by observing that his brother did not take questions affecting public welfare, or the question of the immortality of the soul, a bit more to heart than he did chess problems or the ingenious design of a new machine.

Nor was this all. For the problem was more than the leveling out of what should have been a clear hierarchy of concerns. It was that a morally fatal disjunction between life and thought seemed by necessity to come with intellectual activity. This disjunction, in turn, had at least two aspects. First, a flight from genuine confrontation with spiritual matters:

Listening to his brother's conversation with the professor, [Levin] noticed that they linked ... scientific questions with the spiritual and several times almost touched on the latter; but every time they got close to what seemed the most important point, they promptly beat a hasty retreat and plunged back into the sea of subtle distinctions, reservations, quotations, allusions, and references to authorities; and he had difficulty in understanding what they were talking about.

And second, although perhaps less advanced in Koznyshev's own case, was an inability or unwillingness to undertake serious self-examination:

[Sviazhsky] was one of those people-always a source of wonder to Levin-whose very logical if unoriginal convictions find no reflection in their lives, which are most definite and stable in their direction and go their way quite independently and as a rule in diametric contradiction to their convictions.

Ultimately, via this displacement of what Tolstoy regarded as genuine-spiritual-problems, and their projection onto the social plane, the intellectual life becomes its own reward. And a paltry one it is. Later in Anna Karenin, Tolstoy allows Koznyshev, after six years' work, to publish a modestly titled but evidently intended-to-be-magnum opus, Sketch of a Survey of the Principles and Forms of Government in Europe and Russia. Not unnaturally, Koznyshev expected that "the book would make a serious impression on society." "And if it did not cause a revolution in social science"-his true desire?-"it would, at any rate, make a great stir in the scientific world."

Instead, the book is an abject failure:

But a week passed, a second, a third, without the least ripple being apparent. His friends, the specialists and savants, occasionally, out of a sense of politeness, alluded to it. The rest of his acquaintances, not interested in learned works, did not talk of it at all. And in society, just now particularly taken up with other things, complete indifference reigned. In the press, too, for a whole month, there was not a word about his book.

... [A] month went by, then another, and still there was silence.

Only in the Northern Beetle, in a humorous feuilleton ... was a remark slipped in about Koznyshev's book, suggesting in a few contemptuous words that it had long ago been seen through by everybody and consigned to general ridicule.

"At last, in the third month, a critical article appeared in a serious review." But this turned out to be a devastating-and in Koznyshev's view personally hostile-raking over the coals. "Dead silence, both in print and in conversation, followed that review, and Koznyshev saw that the labor of six years into which he had put so much love and care had gone, leaving no trace."

The placement of this episode is interesting in itself. Coming immediately after Anna's suicide, it seems meant to bring home the triviality and futility of intellectual pursuits. Pathetically unable to shed any light on...