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February 18, 2007
Notions of Good Government: Japan's Early Modern Case I.
In several instalments, I'm going to try and summarise here some observations on a particular case of comparative history of early modern political discourse ("intellectual history", we sometimes say, presumably to boost our disciplinary self-confidence). This may sound scarier than it actually is. For the thing under scrutiny is actually a rather widespread and commonly practised activity: for whenever we make public statements, invoke criteria of justice, pronounce evaluations of our political affairs, be it at the ballot box or over a drink, we in fact implicitly subscribe to various sets of notions of what a human community is fundamentally for, what the standards are for exercising power and delegating authority, or what the desirable goals of our public policies ought to be. More or less consciously, and more or less consistently, we stick to some notions of what good government is.
It is interesting enough for its own sake to try and take a good look at what such notions of acceptable, laudable, legitimate exercise of political power may have been in other times and other places. But the value added is that one may in fact – by stepping out of one's customary universe of beliefs and convictions for a moment – get to see and understand better precisely those notions one normally relies on without too much questioning.
The main challenge facing everyone who seriously plunges into the waters of studies in history of early modern Japanese thought is still methodological. Exactly how, applying what sort of narrative and using what conceptual vocabulary, should we go about trying to tell the story? These studies have a history of their own by now, and a prolific one, which has seen various attempts to solve or ignore this elementary problem. The question has always centred on the issues of how much universally relevant or exclusively peculiar the discourse studied here was, into what extent the concerns voiced by Japan's early modern theorists writing from the standpoint of their geographically much isolated society can be translated into terms previously found instructive and helpful in the treatment of other self-reflective social and political theories formulated in the West, and into what extent should these concerns be found unique and locally or ethnically specific, be it in the positive or negative sense of grasping this uniqueness. There has always been an all-pervading sense of peculiarity and uniqueness, supported by a lot of self-consciousness, behind most Japanese studies as practiced both at home and abroad. The unique otherness of the culture and its history was taken for granted and most intellectual effort concentrated on accounting for the assumed uniqueness in a consistent manner. Yet, it seems to be too late in history today for us to just presume the peculiar uniqueness of a Far Eastern culture and admit a self-validating explanatory power to its exotic nature.
An enquiry is attempted here into whether two disparate early modern discourses – that of Japan and that of Western Europe, broadly speaking – coming out of widely differing intellectual traditions, historical experience and seemingly incompatible social environments, can still be found sharing some portions of the problems they’re respectively dealing with concerning society, economy and politics, and into what extent the two can be discussed by means of the same concepts and the same vocabulary without committing violence or manipulation on either of them. The genre of history of “political thought” is a category which after all provides a common denomination to the debate of the historical developments of both the western and the Japanese discourse on the subjects of social and political order. To what extent can the two be described by the same vocabulary? To what extent can they be seen as addressing similar sorts of issues, or even offering similar sorts of explanations? Could their respective stories be written at least as much as different chapters of the same book?
Any attempt to answer such questions must necessarily sooner or later confront the crucial problem of the extent into which the history in general and particularly intellectual history of Far East has already been – under the overwhelming influence of Western social sciences rushed in along with modern technology and institutions – retold in terms of categories and patterns of development found previously valid or helpful for organising the material of the Western history of thought.
The approach adopted in this work shall be one of taking sets of general notions found highly significant for either or both of the discourses and exploring the possible parallels and divergences in their respective treatment by individual authors, their relative importance for the respective discourses, ways of converging or diverging developments and evaluation.
Dealing thus with ideas more than with their bearers is not inevitably identical with subscribing to any of those current views which make it their point and article of faith to look away from human agency and the subject of the author. The proposed form of this essay is rather determined by its intended length and purpose and should not be found incompatible with the more classical – biographical – treatments of the themes of early modern intellectual history or history of political thought. However, it should be understood, dealt with here will not be an exhaustive account of chronologically arranged unfolding of social and political thinking in the course of two and half centuries of Tokugawa rule, nor an in-depth analysis of a representative sample of great thinkers of the period. This is because I shall not be looking for enclosed systems of thought and their inner logical coherence as a piece of theory, but rather for change in the uses of terminology – within texts of individual authors or schools as well as across any boundaries between those – and value patterns applied to advocating the available explications of social order and government, and its preservation or reform.
Another reason for intentionally avoiding the chronological treatment of the subject is a conscious attempt to avoid the trap of a teleological interpretation of the material in question. It is tempting to organize the material along the lines of an evolutionary narrative which leads the story from the darkness of feudal prejudice to the dawn of potentially liberal tendencies. Besides being far from evident, such interpretation seems to start from a pre-established answer and only pose questions which lead to confirming such previously known truth.
Posted by david at February 18, 2007 11:48 PM