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ahorbinskiBibliographic 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.
Historiographical Engagement: With the entire intellectual tradition of social science in Japan at its heights, and particularly with the founders and major practitioners of the Uno School of Japanese Marxism, and with the works of the late Maruyama Masao.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Barshay defines social science "in the most general sense as a science of institutional modernity whose originary condition was the 'abstraction of the world'" (14-15) and further clarifies that he sees it as a body of cultural discourses, which Barshay sees as the "intellectual and emotional tissue[s] of such struggles" (16) over who speaks, how, and what they say about the world--discourse is representational and as such open by definition to contest, as well as to agreement. Further, what social scientists say about the world in their discourses on it is taken to be rational in a secular, (empirically?) verifiable sense. In Japan, which took the "capitalist reactionary" path to modernity, social science was constructed as a discipline at the same time as the state was constructing itself as authoritarian and modernizing, leaving both the state and social science to grapple with the unease produced by successful but "late" modernization both domestically and abroad.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Japanese social science has unfolded in a series of five distinct "moments": the first such occurred in the 1890s immediately after the suppression of the Freedom and Popular Rights movement and the grant of the Meiji Constitution and authorized social science and the state under the sign of "imperial modernization," taking both to be properly located at the unity between the imperial institution and a village-structured society: neotraditional. The "liberal" moment in the first three decades of the 20thC instead saw Japan as "normal" and not particular and was thus critical of the first moment; the third, that of Marxism, synthesized Japan as both normal and particular (and bitterly fought within itself as to the exact nature of Japanese development, right up until the Thought Police broke down the doors, in some cases). For all the brutal repression of its proponents, however, Marxism in the long term has continued to structure all of social science in Japan in a way that is simply inconceivable in the United States, and it thoroughly informs the fourth moment, in which postwar modernism (kindaishugi) sought to appropriate and rehabilitate what it could from prewar Marxist critiques in order to create a new Japanese person, a democratic citizen, but was subsumed and overcome by the fifth and final moment was embodied in a bifurcated, prolonged moment of both "culturalism" (Nihonjinron) and "growthism", both of which have been essentially vitiated by the Heisei recession. Where social science and Japan go from here remains unknown, and undetermined.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples The Kôzo-ha or Lectures Faction, which was associated with the Comintern, of the prewar Japanese Marxist school, and its viewpoint on the nature of Japanese capitalism is typified in Yamada Moritarô's Analysis of Japanese capitalism, which argued that the Japanese particularism on which the state project of imperial modernization was predicated was in fact backwardness itself, the control of the present by past relations. In his conception of the relationship between industrialization and the means of production, however, Yamada's views never progressed beyond the decade of the Sino-Japanese War or at least World War I, which rendered him incapable of understanding the system's inherent durability. On the other hand, Yamada made capitalism in Japan visible, a thought crime of no small import, and held an imperfect mirror up to the social compact that cloaked rapacious exploitation and impoverishment with nostrums of beautiful customs and peerless traditions--and in that sense his analysis, while it has been supplemented, has not yet been fully succeeded.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples Uno Kôzo founded the most influential school of postwar Japanese Marxism, in which he held to a strict separation between politics and political economy and argued that political economy had a tripartite structure: that of "basic principles" articulated out of Marx's Capital, of "stage theory," which dealt with the development of capitalism in the age of imperialism, and finally "analysis of current conditions," which unified the first two levels. Uno's system is a major development in the history of global Marxism, of international social science, and in the history of social thought in modern Japan, and its analysis of its own capitalist development. Uno was notable for his break with Stalinism in the 1950s, as well as for his ideological honesty inasmuch as he did not find in Marxism any "principle of hope", and offered no guarantees of political Marxism's success, precisely because "science" in and of itself was his sovereign category of thought, and had no room for anything beyond what could be empirically known--outside of which realm ethics decisively lies.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The Uno School came to dominate the study of political economy in Japan at least through the 1970s and reached its fullest triumph and ultimate decomposition in the work of three of its acolytes: Ôuchi Tsutomu (1918-2009), Baba Hiroji (1933-2011), and Tamanoi Yoshirô (1918-85). Ôuchi attempted to complete the formulations of his master Uno, particularly in the vexed question of the relation of "state monopoly capitalism" to 'stage theory,' and strove to find the theory that would allow it to account for current conditions in Japan. Baba by contrast saw that the salient feature of postwar Japanese capitalism and indeed of postwar capitalism worldwide was the accumulation of wealth: unsurprisingly, then, his was a resolutely world systemic view which ironically led him to reformulate the idea of Japanese particularism in the guise of "companyism" and then relink this to the global unsustainability of capitalist consumption, the fulfillment of capitalism itself, worldwide: companyism, as the Heisei recession shows, is not an alternative to rapacious capitalism. Tamanoi, by contrast, took a human-centered, ecologically conscious view of how to live in the world (indeed, almost of Dasein in the Heideggerian sense), articulating a concept of a "living system" that integrated all aspects of economy and society on a global level and shared an important forerunner in the work of the Edo-period outcast philosopher Andô Shôeki (whose influence has cropped up periodically throughout the modern period). Tamanoi articulated a vision of globally linked local communities that may yet speak powerfully to the 21stC and the 3rd millennium.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter takes a brief step back to consider the postwar attempts of Japanese Marxists and modernists to articulate a viable social ethics that allows for civil society, and articulates how to live well within it, in the vein of the thwarted visions of Fukuzawa Yukichi (who even now graces the ¥10000 note), the Benjamin Franklin of Japan in the truest sense. That even Maruyama, the prophet of citizenship in the Japanese postwar period, could not fully solve this dilemma in theory (to say nothing of actuality), speaks to the vexed nature of civil society and who is to populate it in Japan since the end of the Edo period. At one point in the 1980s the notorious Prime Minister Nakasone declared that "The citizen is our enemy" (Shimin ha wareware no teki da), which is another way of expressing the fragility of the concept of citizenship. From the perspective of democratic theory, this is a continuing problem.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter offers an expansive consideration of the career and thought of the late Maruyama Masao, the premier political scientist of the postwar period. Claiming that Japan had never truly become modern, and needed to do so in order to become democratic, Maruyama famously in the immediate postwar laid the blame for the disasters of the imperial period solely at the feet of the state's fascism and its consequent stymying of the development of politically and subjectively autonomous individuals: in a word, the imperial institution, which suffocated all. Maruyama staked his faith, publicaly and futilely, in the creation of a mass citizenry of democratic subjects and of a true democracy in Japan, which the failure of the 1960 Anpô treaty protests and the subsequent chaotic fragmentation of the 1960s student protest movements into factional and pointless violence rendered all too impossible. Maruyama, who was himself subjected to student violence, turned toward ancient history towards the end of his career, seeking in the "deep things" of ancient Japan reasons for the failure of the democratic project in the contemporary era, a validation in a sort of neo-nativism as it were of his "utopian pessimism." That said, however, his indictment of the national community, and his hopes for the development of "true" citizenship and democracy, remain painfully relevant.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples "if the formation of social science has any significance, it must surely lie in its knowing, methodical challenge to the collective narcissism that is the lifeblood of the modern national state, perhaps of all modern identities. … To say that after all, 'we' social scientists--whether as intellectuals or functionaries--are powerless before history is merely to relive ourselves of the fear that we may have done harm. … Our only 'salvation'--let us not laugh at this--lies in having a transparent, communicable method. This is our only means to help society unlock its capacity for self-transformation and renewal." (253-55) Fiat.
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.
Historiographical Engagement: With the entire intellectual tradition of social science in Japan at its heights, and particularly with the founders and major practitioners of the Uno School of Japanese Marxism, and with the works of the late Maruyama Masao.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Barshay defines social science "in the most general sense as a science of institutional modernity whose originary condition was the 'abstraction of the world'" (14-15) and further clarifies that he sees it as a body of cultural discourses, which Barshay sees as the "intellectual and emotional tissue[s] of such struggles" (16) over who speaks, how, and what they say about the world--discourse is representational and as such open by definition to contest, as well as to agreement. Further, what social scientists say about the world in their discourses on it is taken to be rational in a secular, (empirically?) verifiable sense. In Japan, which took the "capitalist reactionary" path to modernity, social science was constructed as a discipline at the same time as the state was constructing itself as authoritarian and modernizing, leaving both the state and social science to grapple with the unease produced by successful but "late" modernization both domestically and abroad.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Japanese social science has unfolded in a series of five distinct "moments": the first such occurred in the 1890s immediately after the suppression of the Freedom and Popular Rights movement and the grant of the Meiji Constitution and authorized social science and the state under the sign of "imperial modernization," taking both to be properly located at the unity between the imperial institution and a village-structured society: neotraditional. The "liberal" moment in the first three decades of the 20thC instead saw Japan as "normal" and not particular and was thus critical of the first moment; the third, that of Marxism, synthesized Japan as both normal and particular (and bitterly fought within itself as to the exact nature of Japanese development, right up until the Thought Police broke down the doors, in some cases). For all the brutal repression of its proponents, however, Marxism in the long term has continued to structure all of social science in Japan in a way that is simply inconceivable in the United States, and it thoroughly informs the fourth moment, in which postwar modernism (kindaishugi) sought to appropriate and rehabilitate what it could from prewar Marxist critiques in order to create a new Japanese person, a democratic citizen, but was subsumed and overcome by the fifth and final moment was embodied in a bifurcated, prolonged moment of both "culturalism" (Nihonjinron) and "growthism", both of which have been essentially vitiated by the Heisei recession. Where social science and Japan go from here remains unknown, and undetermined.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples The Kôzo-ha or Lectures Faction, which was associated with the Comintern, of the prewar Japanese Marxist school, and its viewpoint on the nature of Japanese capitalism is typified in Yamada Moritarô's Analysis of Japanese capitalism, which argued that the Japanese particularism on which the state project of imperial modernization was predicated was in fact backwardness itself, the control of the present by past relations. In his conception of the relationship between industrialization and the means of production, however, Yamada's views never progressed beyond the decade of the Sino-Japanese War or at least World War I, which rendered him incapable of understanding the system's inherent durability. On the other hand, Yamada made capitalism in Japan visible, a thought crime of no small import, and held an imperfect mirror up to the social compact that cloaked rapacious exploitation and impoverishment with nostrums of beautiful customs and peerless traditions--and in that sense his analysis, while it has been supplemented, has not yet been fully succeeded.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples Uno Kôzo founded the most influential school of postwar Japanese Marxism, in which he held to a strict separation between politics and political economy and argued that political economy had a tripartite structure: that of "basic principles" articulated out of Marx's Capital, of "stage theory," which dealt with the development of capitalism in the age of imperialism, and finally "analysis of current conditions," which unified the first two levels. Uno's system is a major development in the history of global Marxism, of international social science, and in the history of social thought in modern Japan, and its analysis of its own capitalist development. Uno was notable for his break with Stalinism in the 1950s, as well as for his ideological honesty inasmuch as he did not find in Marxism any "principle of hope", and offered no guarantees of political Marxism's success, precisely because "science" in and of itself was his sovereign category of thought, and had no room for anything beyond what could be empirically known--outside of which realm ethics decisively lies.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The Uno School came to dominate the study of political economy in Japan at least through the 1970s and reached its fullest triumph and ultimate decomposition in the work of three of its acolytes: Ôuchi Tsutomu (1918-2009), Baba Hiroji (1933-2011), and Tamanoi Yoshirô (1918-85). Ôuchi attempted to complete the formulations of his master Uno, particularly in the vexed question of the relation of "state monopoly capitalism" to 'stage theory,' and strove to find the theory that would allow it to account for current conditions in Japan. Baba by contrast saw that the salient feature of postwar Japanese capitalism and indeed of postwar capitalism worldwide was the accumulation of wealth: unsurprisingly, then, his was a resolutely world systemic view which ironically led him to reformulate the idea of Japanese particularism in the guise of "companyism" and then relink this to the global unsustainability of capitalist consumption, the fulfillment of capitalism itself, worldwide: companyism, as the Heisei recession shows, is not an alternative to rapacious capitalism. Tamanoi, by contrast, took a human-centered, ecologically conscious view of how to live in the world (indeed, almost of Dasein in the Heideggerian sense), articulating a concept of a "living system" that integrated all aspects of economy and society on a global level and shared an important forerunner in the work of the Edo-period outcast philosopher Andô Shôeki (whose influence has cropped up periodically throughout the modern period). Tamanoi articulated a vision of globally linked local communities that may yet speak powerfully to the 21stC and the 3rd millennium.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter takes a brief step back to consider the postwar attempts of Japanese Marxists and modernists to articulate a viable social ethics that allows for civil society, and articulates how to live well within it, in the vein of the thwarted visions of Fukuzawa Yukichi (who even now graces the ¥10000 note), the Benjamin Franklin of Japan in the truest sense. That even Maruyama, the prophet of citizenship in the Japanese postwar period, could not fully solve this dilemma in theory (to say nothing of actuality), speaks to the vexed nature of civil society and who is to populate it in Japan since the end of the Edo period. At one point in the 1980s the notorious Prime Minister Nakasone declared that "The citizen is our enemy" (Shimin ha wareware no teki da), which is another way of expressing the fragility of the concept of citizenship. From the perspective of democratic theory, this is a continuing problem.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter offers an expansive consideration of the career and thought of the late Maruyama Masao, the premier political scientist of the postwar period. Claiming that Japan had never truly become modern, and needed to do so in order to become democratic, Maruyama famously in the immediate postwar laid the blame for the disasters of the imperial period solely at the feet of the state's fascism and its consequent stymying of the development of politically and subjectively autonomous individuals: in a word, the imperial institution, which suffocated all. Maruyama staked his faith, publicaly and futilely, in the creation of a mass citizenry of democratic subjects and of a true democracy in Japan, which the failure of the 1960 Anpô treaty protests and the subsequent chaotic fragmentation of the 1960s student protest movements into factional and pointless violence rendered all too impossible. Maruyama, who was himself subjected to student violence, turned toward ancient history towards the end of his career, seeking in the "deep things" of ancient Japan reasons for the failure of the democratic project in the contemporary era, a validation in a sort of neo-nativism as it were of his "utopian pessimism." That said, however, his indictment of the national community, and his hopes for the development of "true" citizenship and democracy, remain painfully relevant.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples "if the formation of social science has any significance, it must surely lie in its knowing, methodical challenge to the collective narcissism that is the lifeblood of the modern national state, perhaps of all modern identities. … To say that after all, 'we' social scientists--whether as intellectuals or functionaries--are powerless before history is merely to relive ourselves of the fear that we may have done harm. … Our only 'salvation'--let us not laugh at this--lies in having a transparent, communicable method. This is our only means to help society unlock its capacity for self-transformation and renewal." (253-55) Fiat.
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.