The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions

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 scientists 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-image was inescapably marked by a sense of difference from the ostensibly advanced societies that provided the late-comers with the institutional models they sought to follow or reject. Building on a historical overview of major Japanese trends, Barshay focuses on 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 together provided Japanese social scienceand indeed the wider society itselfwith moments of shared self-understanding. The book ends with a question for others to answer: if the condition of developmental alienation in Japan has been resolved, what is the purpose and orientation of social science now?

RUS

1890- . , (). , , , , , .