The social sciences in modern Japan : the marxian and modernist traditions / Andrew E. Barshay.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barshay, Andrew E.

Series:

Twentieth-century Japan

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Social sciences--Japan--History.

Social sciences.

Intellectuals--Japan--History.

Intellectuals.

Socialism--Japan--History.

Socialism.

Political culture.

History.

Japan.

Democracy--Japan--History.

Democracy.

Political culture--Japan--History.

Physical Description:

xiv, 331 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2004.

Summary:

This incisive intellectual history of Japanese social science from the 1890s to the present day considers the various forms of modernity that the processes of "development" or "rationalization" have engendered and the role social solentists have played in their emergence. Andrew E. Barshay argues that Japan, together with Germany and pre-revolutionary Russia, represented forms of developmental alienation from the Atlantic Rim symptomatic of late-emerging empires. Neither members nor colonies of the Atlantic Rim, these were independent national societies whose cultural self-images were nevertheless marked by a sense of difference. Barshay presents a historical overview of major Japanese trends and treats two of the most powerful streams of Japanese social science, one associated with Marxism, the other with Modernism (kindaishugi), whose most representative figure is the late Maruyama Masao. Demonstrating that a sense of developmental alienation shaped the thinking of social scientists in both streams, the author argues that they provided Japanese social science with moments of shared self-understanding. Barshay explains that the rapid urbanization of Japanese society since the 1960s removed much of the salience of received social science, which had been concerned with the overcoming of perceived backwardness and the gulf between city and country that was its most characteristic feature. Even as Japan's postwar economic success reconfirmed the country's enormous significance in the history of the modern world, Japanese social scientists found themselves struggling to produce a body of knowledge capable of explaining the fundamentally new realities of their present. As Barshay demonstrates, the growing complexities of the current decade make this task both more difficult and more crucial.

Contents:

1. Social Science as History 1

2. The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: An Overview 36

3. Doubly Cruel: Marxism and the Presence of the Past in Japanese Capitalism 72

4. Thinking through Capital: Uno Kozo and Marxian Political Economy 92

5. School's Out? The Uno School Meets Japanese Capitalism 120

6. Social Science and Ethics: Civil Society Marxism 175

7. Imagining Democracy in Postwar Japan: Maruyama Masao as a Political Thinker 197.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 301-309) and index.

ISBN:

0520236459

OCLC:

52509484

Online:

Publisher description