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Bibliographic Data: Barshay, Andrew E. The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxist and Modernist Traditions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Main Argument: Barshay starts from the hypothesis that "the form assumed by social science in a given national setting is closely bound up with the institutional path to modernity taken by that nation" (x) and that Japan, Germany and late imperial Russia were "developmentally alienated" from the experiences of the so-called Atlantic Rim countries, who were perceived as being developmentally "advanced," and that this sense of lateness was the primary determinant of each country's social science. Barshay goes on to analyze and explicate what he sees as the two primary strands of social science in modern Japan, the Marxian tradition in various schools, and the brand of "modernism" (which despite its name was a postwar, fairly progressive phenomenon) advanced by the late great political scientist Maruyama Masao.
( The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. )
Critical assessment: This is an excellent, erudite, empathetic book. Barshay writes with a thorough understanding of and sympathy for his subjects, and with a certain profound, implicit sadness: as he told me when I remarked on that to him, it's an elegy.
This elegiac quality is particularly evident in the chapter on Maruyama, whom Barshay worked with at Tôdai and who emerges here as a titanic, solitary figure whose time slipped away from him before he knew it--but who, crucially, didn't make much of an effort to make clear to his fellow citizens the choice they faced between, to put it crudely, the red pill or the blue pill, between nationalist modernism and progressive postmodernism. Maruyama bet his money and took his chances and chose the blue pill, and ought to be admired for having the courage of his convictions, but if his time and a moment like that comes round again it will not be through people like him remaining aloof. Indeed, I think the real discovery of this book isn't the work on Maruyama but Barshay's spirited introduction and exploration of the thought of Tamanoi Yoshirô, the last member of the Uno School, who wandered far afield into a sort of globalist environmentally conscious localism and whose thought has, in my opinion, huge potential value as a potential foundation for a post-Westphalian, post-humanist future.
Further reading: Maruyama Masao; Tamanoi Yoshirô; Yasunaga Toshinobu, Andô Shôeki
Meta notes: For the purposes of the book Barshay treats the question of whether history is one of the social sciences as settled, but even from talking with people in our department it's clear that I'm not the only historian with strong reservations on that score. Personally, I tend to conceptualize my interest in history as an interest in narrative, on a fundamental level, so the idea of there being something 'scientific' about it is one I regard with a certain degree of skepticism. I don't know how, short of turning into political science and importing statistics and game theory into the marrow of the discipline, we as historians could really claim to be "scientists" in any meaningful sense of the term, though I also think the very idea of "the social sciences" is a legacy of the totalizing views of the 19thC, which thought of Science as Truth, when in reality it's an ideology and a worldview, one among many which gets productive results when you apply its methodology to the world. One of the reasons I didn't go into poli sci is in fact its heavy reliance on mathematics (not that I don't love mathematics, because I do, but I love narrative more), and one thing that's been made clear to me over the course of this semester, as if I had any doubt, is that historians have no common empirical rubric by which to judge historical phenomena and events--if we did, we would have truly equal, truly comparative histories of Asia and Euro-America, for example, and aside from a few isolated pioneering attempts, we just don't. So we have a long way to go, both in terms of developing our own empirical standards and in recognizing that "science" has no a priori, stronger claim to Truth than any other discipline.
Main Argument: Barshay starts from the hypothesis that "the form assumed by social science in a given national setting is closely bound up with the institutional path to modernity taken by that nation" (x) and that Japan, Germany and late imperial Russia were "developmentally alienated" from the experiences of the so-called Atlantic Rim countries, who were perceived as being developmentally "advanced," and that this sense of lateness was the primary determinant of each country's social science. Barshay goes on to analyze and explicate what he sees as the two primary strands of social science in modern Japan, the Marxian tradition in various schools, and the brand of "modernism" (which despite its name was a postwar, fairly progressive phenomenon) advanced by the late great political scientist Maruyama Masao.
( The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. )
Critical assessment: This is an excellent, erudite, empathetic book. Barshay writes with a thorough understanding of and sympathy for his subjects, and with a certain profound, implicit sadness: as he told me when I remarked on that to him, it's an elegy.
This elegiac quality is particularly evident in the chapter on Maruyama, whom Barshay worked with at Tôdai and who emerges here as a titanic, solitary figure whose time slipped away from him before he knew it--but who, crucially, didn't make much of an effort to make clear to his fellow citizens the choice they faced between, to put it crudely, the red pill or the blue pill, between nationalist modernism and progressive postmodernism. Maruyama bet his money and took his chances and chose the blue pill, and ought to be admired for having the courage of his convictions, but if his time and a moment like that comes round again it will not be through people like him remaining aloof. Indeed, I think the real discovery of this book isn't the work on Maruyama but Barshay's spirited introduction and exploration of the thought of Tamanoi Yoshirô, the last member of the Uno School, who wandered far afield into a sort of globalist environmentally conscious localism and whose thought has, in my opinion, huge potential value as a potential foundation for a post-Westphalian, post-humanist future.
Further reading: Maruyama Masao; Tamanoi Yoshirô; Yasunaga Toshinobu, Andô Shôeki
Meta notes: For the purposes of the book Barshay treats the question of whether history is one of the social sciences as settled, but even from talking with people in our department it's clear that I'm not the only historian with strong reservations on that score. Personally, I tend to conceptualize my interest in history as an interest in narrative, on a fundamental level, so the idea of there being something 'scientific' about it is one I regard with a certain degree of skepticism. I don't know how, short of turning into political science and importing statistics and game theory into the marrow of the discipline, we as historians could really claim to be "scientists" in any meaningful sense of the term, though I also think the very idea of "the social sciences" is a legacy of the totalizing views of the 19thC, which thought of Science as Truth, when in reality it's an ideology and a worldview, one among many which gets productive results when you apply its methodology to the world. One of the reasons I didn't go into poli sci is in fact its heavy reliance on mathematics (not that I don't love mathematics, because I do, but I love narrative more), and one thing that's been made clear to me over the course of this semester, as if I had any doubt, is that historians have no common empirical rubric by which to judge historical phenomena and events--if we did, we would have truly equal, truly comparative histories of Asia and Euro-America, for example, and aside from a few isolated pioneering attempts, we just don't. So we have a long way to go, both in terms of developing our own empirical standards and in recognizing that "science" has no a priori, stronger claim to Truth than any other discipline.
