Abstract
The closing chapter summarizes the main arguments of the book and the implications of Fukuzawa’s theory and practice for readers in the West and the East. Hwang compares Fukuzawa’s defense of rationalism to Kant’s courageous defense of science against religious attacks. Moreover, Hwang emphasizes that bourgeois liberalism is a necessary condition for modernization. Existential politics based on “national self-determination” is, by contrast, treated as dangerous, especially where the liberal tradition is weak. The emancipatory project of Enlightenment liberalism requires unconditional support for its initial principles of individual autonomy and liberal rule of law.
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Notes
- 1.
Japan was forced to return the Liaodong Peninsula to China by the Triple Intervention of the Western powers—Russia, France, and Germany—who wanted to check Japan’s expansion into China. Russia’s leading role in this intervention particularly enraged the Japanese public, which became one of the causes of the Russo-Japanese War. Fukuzawa’s response to the Triple Intervention was rather calm, arguing that Japan should endure this humiliation and at the same time endeavor to become more powerful. See Fukuzawa Yukichi, Fukuzawa Yukichi Zenshū [Complete collection of Fukuzawa Yukichi] vol. 15 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970), 175–176.
- 2.
Koizumi Shinzō, Fukuzawa Yukichi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1966), 197.
- 3.
The debate about Fukuzawa in the 1950s and later was mostly focused on Fukuzawa’s short pamphlet “On Shedding Asia” (or “On Leaving Asia,” Datsu-a ron). In the pamphlet, Fukuzawa castigated the reactionary elites and people in Korea and China and declared that Japan should leave its “bad friends in Asia” and treat them “how the Western nations treat them.” See Zenshū vol. 10, 238–240. I deliberately skipped discussing “On Shedding Asia” because, first, Fukuzawa’s authorship of the pamphlet has been challenged based on a slight difference in its style from his other writings, and, second, it is too short to discuss the true depth of Fukuzawa’s existential turn that I focused on in Chap. 4. See Hirayama Yō, Fukuzawa Yukichi no shinjitsu [The Truth of Fukuzawa Yukichi] (Tokyo: Bungeishunjū, 2004).
- 4.
See Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 20–21.
- 5.
On the Japanese public’s rage against the Treaty of Portsmouth, signed in 1905 between Russia and Japan, see ibid., 26.
- 6.
Ibid., 23.
- 7.
“Conversion” among Japanese liberals and socialists was so common that it was hard to blame anyone simply for collaborating with the totalitarians after 1940s. Even many communists betrayed the Comintern and started collaborating with the government, believing that communism could be manifested within the rule of the Emperor, which seems to me a typical Oriental fantasy of “equality under one man.” On the problem of conversions in the 1930s, see Rikki Kersten, “Painting the Emperor Red: The Emperor and the Socialists in the 1930s,” and Fujita Shōzō, Tenkō no shisōshi teki kenkyū [A Research on the Intellectual History of Conversion] (Misuzu Shobō, 1997).
- 8.
Of course, the popular understanding of the given sentence was out of context and thus misinterpreted. What Fukuzawa actually offered was a question on why there was inequality between people’s abilities even though Heaven made them equal, and his answer to the question was that it depended on their level of education. See Fukuzawa, Yukichi Fukuzawa, An Encouragement of Learning , trans. David A. Dilworth (New York, Columbia University Press, 2012), 3.
- 9.
The question of whether the idea of progress influenced Japanese imperialism is important but unfortunately cannot be discussed further in this study due to its theoretical and historical depth. What I can briefly add here is that the notions of “progress” and “evolution” were introduced to the Japanese intellectual scene almost at the same time, but the two concepts were often confused. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics (1851) was widely read by the People’s Rights activists, not only because the theory of social evolution provided a reason that Japan should accept Western philosophy, but also because its title was mistranslated as “A Theory of Equal Rights in Society” (shakai heiken ron). This is just one of many examples that show how Japanese intellectuals struggled with new concepts from the West. One thing I can assuredly say is that the intellectuals who were influenced by Spencer’s theory of social evolution, such as Katō Hiroyuki, later became conservatives. By contrast, liberals, including Ueki Emori and Nakae Chōmin, who read social contract theories, such as Locke and Rousseau, generally remained progressives. See Maruyama Masao and Katō Shūichi, Honyaku to nihonno kindai [Translation and Japan’s Modernity] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1998), 49–53, 153–155.
- 10.
Yukichi Fukuzawa, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, trans. by David A. Dilworth & G. Cameron Hurst III, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 240–241.
- 11.
Maruyama Masao, Bunmeiron no gairyaku wo yomu [Reading An Outline of a Theory of Civilization] vol. 3 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1987) 259–261.
- 12.
This is too big a question to answer in this study, but I rely here on Stephen Eric Bronner’s new interpretation of “tradition” in his Ideas in Action: Political Tradition in the Twentieth Century (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
- 13.
Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, trans. David L. Colclasure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 74.
- 14.
See Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, “Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946–1986,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 3, (1993): 624–638.
- 15.
Ibid., 69–70.
- 16.
Yun Chi-ho, “Diary of Yun Chi-ho, December 14, 1884,” The Database of Korean History, accessed June 7, 2018, http://db.history.go.kr/item/level.do?itemId=sa&levelId=sa_024_0020_0120_0270&types=o.
- 17.
It is not difficult to find English resources for Uchimura Kanzō, but it seems that very few studies have been done about Ham Seok-heon outside of South Korea. For a biography of Ham written in English, see Sung Soo Kim, Ham Sok Hon: Voice of the People and Pioneer of Religious Pluralism in Twentieth Century Korea (Seoul: Samin, 2001).
- 18.
Shōwa is the name of the period of rule of the infamous Emperor Hirohito, who led Japan into the disaster of the Pacific War. Japanese historians often rely on the dichotomy of “Taishō democracy” and “Shōwa fascism,” separating the relatively liberal democratic period under Emperor Taishō and the overtly reactionary era under Hirohito. The view of the Meiji era as “bright” and the Shōwa era as “dark” is common among moderate conservatives, who take a positive view of Meiji Japan’s expansion as an effort to retain national independence and encourage enlightenment in Asia against imperialism, while dismissing the totalitarianism under Hirohito. Yasukawa says Shiba Ryōtarō’s famous novel Clouds Above the Hill represents such a (moderate) conservative view. See Yasukawa, 9, 46–48.
- 19.
Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 594–617.
- 20.
Gordon, 132.
- 21.
Ibid., 178.
- 22.
“tonikaku, nin’gen no suru koto wo yaritai tte, minna iundesu,” ibid., 223–228.
- 23.
Ibid., 255–263.
- 24.
The rejection of modernization is, although not impossible, a very limited option in political terms. It has been successful only in extremely closed societies, such as Bhutan. Even the Kingdom of Bhutan is now challenged by the increasing influence of globalization. See Anbarasan Ethirajan, “Reality hits charming Bhutan,” BBC News, October 30, 2013.
- 25.
Although the theoretical foundation of North Korea’s “self-reliance” was based on a so-called “human-centered” (in’gan jungsim) philosophy, its political function was obviously for survival as a nation in the wake of the turmoil in the communist world, such as Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist movement and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It was particularly strengthened in light of China’s pro-West policy since the 1970s.
- 26.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 475.
- 27.
As a general defense of political theory as a subfield of political science, see the following: “In the letter endorsed by the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association, we discover that ‘[i]n the development of the discipline of Political Science … political theory … has been [its] moral voice’; that political theory usefully raises questions of gender and race; and that it ‘remind(s) us that our methodological choices have normative and ethical implications that we cannot ignore.’” Andrew Rehfeld, “Offensive Political Theory,” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 2 (June 2010), 468.
- 28.
“…die große Bedrohung zu sehen, daß sich der Bolschewismus und der Amerikanismus zu einer einzigen Wesensgestalt vereinigen und das Deutschtum aus dieser Einheit heraus als Mitte des Abendlandes selbst zerstören.” (Jan 29, 1943), Walter Homolka and Arnulf Heidegger ed., Heidegger und der Antisemitismus: Positionen im Widerstreit: mit Briefen von Martin und Fritz Heidegger (Freiburg: Herder, 2016), 86.
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———. 2008. An Outline of a Theory of Civilization. Trans. David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst III. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2012. An Encouragement of Learning. Trans. David A. Dilworth. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Hwang, M. (2020). Conclusion. In: Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Bourgeois Liberalism. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21530-9_6
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