Organizer: Douglas Howland, Woodrow Wilson International Center
Chair and Discussant: George M. Wilson, Indiana University
Discussant: Andrew E. Barshay, University of California, Berkeley
Current interest in civil society is analogous to the discussion of modernization theory in the 1950s and ‘60s. Where capital formation and industrialization were praised as modern values and proper goals of a modernizing society, now civil society is credited with the ability to generate democratic political behavior, particularly in areas emerging from communist, militarist, or otherwise authoritarian conditions. For many, encouraging "civil society" is part of revitalizing the public sphere in opposition to overwhelming state power, but exactly what "civil society" is, how it emerges, and its relative power are fiercely contested issues.
This panel sets aside normative judgments in an effort to uncover the historical connection between civil society and modern nationhood in Japan. As the Tokugawa regime was dismantled, a central question became what would remain outside the new state’s sphere of interest. Would the Meiji government monopolize all governmental activity? The possibility of independent activity was crucial to attempts by the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement to limit oligarchic power, yet the economic, intellectual, and civic structures necessary to maintain such autonomy had few native antecedents.
Given that social actions and social representations mutually inform each other, this panel focuses on the task of imagining civil society as a value informing action in Meiji Japan. Douglas Howland considers the development of language to represent the people and their civic associations; Kevin Doak examines the deployment of French political theory in attempts to restructure relations between state and society; and Julia Thomas explores the difficulty of imagining a realm able to mediate between the individual and the state.
Douglas Howland, DePaul University
From the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement of the 1870s and 80s to the demise of "Taisho democracy" in the 1930s, the prospect of popular participation in politics persistently troubled modern Japan. Western political philosophy has traditionally held that the development of representative democracy depends on the structures of civil society that organize "the people" and integrate society with the state: civic and economic associations, legislative assemblies, and public opinion. But how well does this Western tradition explain the problem of civil society in modern Japan?
Unlike most Western nations, Japan became a modern nation while learning the conceptual vocabulary required to identify and operate a modern political system. The contemporary Japanese translation for "society," for example, was standardized only in the last decade of the 19th century; in my analysis, "society" was weighted in favor of the samurai elite who understood their leadership of the Meiji Restoration in terms of a bureaucratic model of "society." Hence, rather than dismiss the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement as only marginally related to the creation of liberal institutions, this paper proposes to describe ways in which civil society was imagined in the course of the Movement. My focus is the set of relations proposed between the "people" and "civil society"—both the civic associations that reportedly encouraged the Movement and the representative institutions that were allegedly the object of the Movement. By uncovering the precise language in which Meiji Japanese imagined the relationship between society and the state, I will offer new insights into the conditions for democracy in modern Japan.
Kevin M. Doak, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
This paper examines the ways in which two important translators of French social theory conceived of society and its relationship to the state. Miyazaki Muryu (1855–1889) was a journalist, political novelist and activist in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement during the 1880s. His 1882 translation of Alexandre Dumas’s Ange Pitou provides a surprising use of France within Japanese political struggles, since Miyazaki emphasizes a Volkisch understanding of the nation that differs from the more common presentations of French nationalism in the Jacobin mode.
By contrast, translator and legal scholar Mitsukuri Rinsho (1846–1897) felt that the Meiji state could be defined in ways consistent with Montesquieu’s "spirit of law" and respect for the people. Mitsukuri rejected warnings that working for the Meiji state was incompatible with democracy and, through his influential translation of the Napoleonic Code, sought to introduce respect for what he called "Droit civil" (minken) within the emerging legal structure of the Meiji state.
Exploring and contrasting how these two influential translators situated society in relation to the state, I will challenge as overly deterministic the dominant Meiji reading of French political thought as a tradition hostile to the state and one necessarily promoting the values of civil society. By emphasizing contingency in these acts of translation, I will redirect attention to the domestic social and political context that shaped the uses of French socio-political thought. This effort will also reveal the multiplicity of interpretative positions that Meiji Japanese located with French social theory.
Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Ueki Emori (1857–1892) was a passionate exponent of democracy, yet he seems incapable of describing a society in which the government does not ultimately swallow up its subjects and divest them of all independent standing. On the one hand, as a young activist in the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, Ueki produced exuberant proclamations of individual freedom based on the very fact of bodiliness. His emphasis on the body per se, rather than its mental or manual capacities, gives Ueki’s theory a radically democratic and inclusive slant. On the other hand, Ueki has extraordinary difficulty describing a means by which this bodiliness can negotiate liberty once it is subject to state authority, an authority which he recognizes as necessary. The state commandeers all middle ground between itself and the individual, ultimately absorbing that individual. In theories of "civil society," it is just this middle ground that is at issue, and it is here, between individual and state, where Ueki’s bouyant imagination fails him.
This paper compares Ueki’s work with model theories of civil society, including those of Paine, Hegel, and Tocqueville, and recent analyses. Why was it so difficult for Ueki to imagine a sphere of cooperative yet non-governmental activity? Did conceiving of the body as a fully integrated entity preclude belief in civic associations which demanded less than complete subjection to the state? Why was Ueki so reluctant to consider institutional constraints on overweening power? Or were Ueki’s views, on the contrary, not so much a failure of democratic vision as a realistic if critical assessment of the operations of modern state power and the vulnerability of the individual?