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The Social Sciences in Modern Japan
The Marxian and Modernist Traditions
By Andrew E. Barshay University of California Press
Copyright © 2004 the Regents of the University of California
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-520-25381-0
Chapter One
Social Science as History
What follows is a historical study of intellectuals and the social sciences, or better, of the intellectual as social scientist, in Japan from the 1890s roughly to the present. But I wish to begin with a Russian parable based on a minor character in a novel by Leo Tolstoy.
The novel is Anna Karenin, the character is Sergei Ivanich Koznyshev. Koznyshev is a city intellectual, a social type of whom Tolstoy was none too fond. Unlike his half-brother Konstantin Levin, Koznyshev takes the institution of the zemstvo land assembly seriously, even, on occasion, upbraiding the great landowner and spiritual pilgrim for ignoring his political responsibilities. This, we are shown, is somewhat unfair to Levin. Not only does Levin write a book on the problem of Russian agriculture-synonymous, in his view, with "the question" of peasant labor-but he also attempts to carry out his ideas on his own estate lands. For his part, Levin finds himself uncomfortable at Koznyshev's presence in the country. Koznyshev regards the country, or more specifically his half-brother's estate, as no more than a "valuable antidote to the corrupt influences of town," a place where he can be lazy. Real, intellectual life is possible only in the city, or in the country to the extent that it can be made a satellite of the city.
Levin is troubled by the effects of abstract thought on the personality of the intellectual:
Levin regarded his brother as a man of vast intellect and culture, as generous in the highest sense of the word and endowed with a special faculty for working for the public good. But in the depths of his heart, the older he grew and the more intimately he knew his brother, the oftener the thought struck him that this faculty for working for the public good, of which he was completely devoid, was perhaps not so much a quality as a lack ... of the vital force, of what is called heart, of the impulse that drives a man to choose some one out of all the innumerable paths of life and to care for that one only. The better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Koznyshev ... had reasoned out in [his mind] that it was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this supposition by observing that his brother did not take questions affecting public welfare, or the question of the immortality of the soul, a bit more to heart than he did chess problems or the ingenious design of a new machine.
Nor was this all. For the problem was more than the leveling out of what should have been a clear hierarchy of concerns. It was that a morally fatal disjunction between life and thought seemed by necessity to come with intellectual activity. This disjunction, in turn, had at least two aspects. First, a flight from genuine confrontation with spiritual matters:
Listening to his brother's conversation with the professor, [Levin] noticed that they linked ... scientific questions with the spiritual and several times almost touched on the latter; but every time they got close to what seemed the most important point, they promptly beat a hasty retreat and plunged back into the sea of subtle distinctions, reservations, quotations, allusions, and references to authorities; and he had difficulty in understanding what they were talking about.
And second, although perhaps less advanced in Koznyshev's own case, was an inability or unwillingness to undertake serious self-examination:
[Sviazhsky] was one of those people-always a source of wonder to Levin-whose very logical if unoriginal convictions find no reflection in their lives, which are most definite and stable in their direction and go their way quite independently and as a rule in diametric contradiction to their convictions.
Ultimately, via this displacement of what Tolstoy regarded as genuine-spiritual-problems, and their projection onto the social plane, the intellectual life becomes its own reward. And a paltry one it is. Later in Anna Karenin, Tolstoy allows Koznyshev, after six years' work, to publish a modestly titled but evidently intended-to-be-magnum opus, Sketch of a Survey of the Principles and Forms of Government in Europe and Russia. Not unnaturally, Koznyshev expected that "the book would make a serious impression on society." "And if it did not cause a revolution in social science"-his true desire?-"it would, at any rate, make a great stir in the scientific world."
Instead, the book is an abject failure:
But a week passed, a second, a third, without the least ripple being apparent. His friends, the specialists and savants, occasionally, out of a sense of politeness, alluded to it. The rest of his acquaintances, not interested in learned works, did not talk of it at all. And in society, just now particularly taken up with other things, complete indifference reigned. In the press, too, for a whole month, there was not a word about his book.
... [A] month went by, then another, and still there was silence.
Only in the Northern Beetle, in a humorous feuilleton ... was a remark slipped in about Koznyshev's book, suggesting in a few contemptuous words that it had long ago been seen through by everybody and consigned to general ridicule.
"At last, in the third month, a critical article appeared in a serious review." But this turned out to be a devastating-and in Koznyshev's view personally hostile-raking over the coals. "Dead silence, both in print and in conversation, followed that review, and Koznyshev saw that the labor of six years into which he had put so much love and care had gone, leaving no trace."
The placement of this episode is interesting in itself. Coming immediately after Anna's suicide, it seems meant to bring home the triviality and futility of intellectual pursuits. Pathetically unable to shed any light on real life as Anna had endured it, such books get what they deserve. Koznyshev, however, does recover. As we saw, "society" was "particularly taken up with other things" when his book appeared, "other things" referring to the Serbian struggles against the Ottomans and the "Slav question." In the public agitation over these issues, Koznyshev senses that "the soul of the nation had become articulate" and throws himself into work on behalf of his "co-religionists and brothers." Even here, Tolstoy is mocking his character. Koznyshev is not alone. Vronsky, Anna's lover, is also caught up in the effort, and consoles himself after Anna has taken her own life by joining the forces. Levin, however, is skeptical of the cause and of the motives underlying the fevered activity on its behalf. In this case, he is also Tolstoy's explicit vehicle.
THE ABSTRACTION OF THE WORLD
In discussing Koznyshev and his book, or more precisely how Levin, and Tolstoy through him, sees such people and their work, I mean more than to point an ironic, mocking finger at myself and the studies that follow. Tolstoy's treatment of Koznyshev is not ignorant ridicule. Tolstoy's own life and thought made this impossible. Nevertheless, he looks upon intellectual activity with classical scorn. What possible relation could there be between the pallid social science of a Koznyshev and the "real" world, with its infinite human variety, its ceaseless moral and spiritual struggles? Is social science real knowledge, good knowledge?
Admittedly, Koznyshev's work is trivial. No change in the condition of the masses will result from its appearance. It is without practical-including ideological-significance. Yet now, in the opening years of the twenty-first century, we need to take the question of the relevance, use, and meaning of social science further than Tolstoy would allow us to go. In ways that Tolstoy could not have seen, or might have refused to acknowledge, the contemporary world is not only the object, but also the product of social scientific knowledge. Of course, earlier epochs have seen human labor, knowledge, and vision brought to bear on the world. The agricultural revolution, or the spread of religious systems such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, transformed human life in profound ways. The question, the modern difference, lies in the nature of change, and of the human agency involved in bringing it about. In conjunction with revolutions in natural science and productive modes, the human perception of change itself has changed; no longer providence, fate, or experience only, it is now something to be willed, caused, and even reproduced on the basis of systematized empirical knowledge. Social science in its broadest sense prescinds from and seeks to lay hold of the process of real world-making. To the extent that the world has been objectified in the operations of social science, it has also been subjectified, and made capable of conscious self-transformation. Social science has not only explicated-or interpreted-the world, it has also transformed it, "for good or evil," as Keynes remarked. As an individual "social scientist," therefore, Koznyshev may have been insignificant, but the practice of systematic social inquiry is not.
It is easy to exaggerate the transformative potential of thought as such. In "settling accounts with [their] erstwhile philosophical conscience" (in The German Ideology, 1846), Marx and Engels aimed their rhetorical artillery at the German penchant for what we may term "metaphysical determinism" in human affairs. Perhaps the power ascribed to "pure" thought is a function of the social distance between thinkers and the masses of people in their own cultural contexts and in the world at large; certainly the case of Germany's metaphysicians, and more starkly that of the Russian intelligentsia, suggests as much. Yet it is precisely such "alienated" thought that, when realized, has reacted with volcanic force on more than one society. In terms of our concern here with the practical significance of social science, therefore, we are still justified in taking seriously the strictures of the German poet Heinrich Heine: "Mark this, ye proud men of action," he wrote in the decade of the revolution of 1848,
[Y]e are nothing but unconscious hodmen of the men of thought who, often in humblest stillness, have appointed you your inevitable task. Maximilian Robespierre was merely the hand of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the bloody hand that drew from the womb of time the body whose soul Rousseau had created.
And what of the humble professor Kant, "who had neither life nor history," yet as the "arch destroyer in the realm of thought, far surpassed in terrorism" Robespierre himself? Comparing the two, Heine exclaims:
But both presented in the highest degree the type of the narrow-minded citizen. Nature had destined them for weighing out coffee and sugar, but fate decided that they should weigh out other things, and into the scales of one it laid a king, into the scales of the other a God.... And they both gave the correct weight!
Admittedly, neither Rousseau nor Kant should be categorized as a "social scientist" by any contemporary standard; nor should the splenetic character of Heine's manifesto against Germany be forgotten. Three points, however, are crucial in Heine's assertions. First, he counterposes humble "men of thought" to "proud men of action." The role of the nameless masses in historical change is left ambiguous; enter Marx. Second, Heine is concerned here with those forces that have destroyed the traditional order, and not so much with the processes of realizing the new one. Finally, and of immediate relevance to our present theme, Heine observes that both Kant and Robespierre operated in their respective spheres as the "type of the narrow-minded citizen." For what is the work of the humble social scientist if not diligently, relentlessly, to translate, to systematize, to "abstract" experience, to confront the social world with its own "common sense" turned inside out? Is it merely the arrogance of social science to claim that social transformation in the modern world has at some point entailed the production and mediation of such abstractions? Or more modestly that in order to be understood, let alone changed, the world must first be made an object, and conceptually reorganized according to categories? Is it not in the sober accumulation of such categorical knowledge of the world that the work of social science consists?
We must, of course, distinguish the phases of such knowledge accumulation. Initially, it may have proceeded from a personal vision and sense of mission to disclose the real workings of the social world, to return it to itself. In attacking mercantilism, for example, Adam Smith sought not to create a "new man" but to reveal him as he really was in social nature. The will to disclose, however, has been transmuted, at certain times and places-not everywhere-into a collective will to transform society, and to do so along scientific or rational lines. Why and how, where and when this transmutation has taken place is a vast historical question. The aim of this book is to show that such a transmutation took place in modern Japan, and to retrace it: but only after setting it in the global context without which its significance will remain needlessly obscured by claims of national exceptionalism.
For the moment, let it suffice to observe that social science in many ways is an expression of the uneasy mutual embrace of these two wills, to disclose and to transform. We live now with a familiar result: in the epoch of hyperspecialization, "we are forced" to know more and more, and to live with the paradoxical contradiction that the intensification both of knowledge and of the impact of its application has been accompanied by a sense of loss of personal agency. In a world where "more" is in fact "less," triviality and waste are ubiquitous and inherent occupational hazards. Libraries and institutes and offices are full of unread books, and those read today may be forgotten tomorrow. It seems difficult indeed to silence Tolstoy's doubts.
But to focus on the decay of the "calling" is to risk a serious misunderstanding; to forget not only the breathtaking excitement that came with the sense of discovery in early modernity (the "will to disclose" rewarded), but also the deep impress of that initial moment, to say nothing of developments to come. Let no one forget modernity's appalling wounds-the achievement of economies of scale in officially sanctioned slaughter, the induced hatreds and ignorance, the profligate and systematic waste (and neglect) of human skills and good faith. It is an open question whether they can be healed by modern people, using the instruments of modernity alone. Perhaps these instruments-of production in all spheres, but especially the institutions and technologies of communication and representative democracy-will someday be surpassed in a postmodern revolution that enhances "local humanities," cushions societies against the vicissitudes of the market, and discloses a new form of political community beyond the simultaneously integrative and atomizing force of the contemporary state. Perhaps, one must always hope.
But what of the present? In this regard, consider the words of Father Gapon's petition to Tsar Nicholas in 1905. Amid the current, misplaced triumphalism of capital, the rapid dissipation of predictions for a "clean sweep" of Communist personnel and groups, and a global politics whose intense conflicts are strongly resistant to ideological categorization, Gapon's call returns us to the moment of democratic resurgence that was the cynosure of post-Cold War hopes. After having addressed employers with demands reflecting the needs of workers, Gapon turned to the issue of a democratically elected constituent assembly. "This," he proclaimed, "is our chief request; in it and on it all else is based; it is ... the only plaster for our painful wounds." This aspiration to democratic dialogue, the conquest of citizenship, evokes the political revolutions of modern times, reminding us that they are not yet, and by their nature can never be, concluded. (Indeed, to whom should this generation's "requests" for representation be addressed?) And to the extent that the conquest of citizenship is a process of the conscious self-transformation of society, I suggest, social science will have its never-ending task. The Czech economist Ota eik, writing in exile more than a decade before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, argued that
everyday experience needs the backing of a progressive social theory. The working people know, quite simply, what they do not want; but alone, without the aid of theory, they cannot set new aims. That is the responsibility of the social scientists-not to think up Utopias, but to analyse the existing contradictions and conflicts in society, to discover their roots in the social system, and then to devise the remedies-therein lies the humane commitment of the social sciences.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Social Sciences in Modern Japan by Andrew E. Barshay Copyright © 2004 by the Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
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