Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi (review)

"This book," the author begins, "is about an idea that arose in Scotland during the eighteenth century and then journeyed to Japan, where it became the cornerstone of an ideology for radical change. The idea is that all societies have progressed, or will progress, through stages from 'savagery' to 'barbarism,' and, eventually, to 'civilization'" (p. 1). Albert Craig examines the critical role that Fukuzawa Yukichi played in appropriating the idea of stages of development found in the writings of Scottish enlightenment thinkers and in other Western histories and applying it to Japan's circumstances in order to provide a roadmap to guide Japan's future progress.

Fukuzawa's was a remarkable achievement that was well ahead of his time. After World War II, when many new nations were created by the collapse of colonial empires, economists and political scientists began serious study of development strategies. Newly independent countries were looking for silver bullets. Of course, Adam Smith had written about some of the issues involved in the eighteenth century. Other, "big think" types came along later—Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and others—but it was not until the post-1945 era that specialists like Robert Solow, W. Arthur Lewis, W. W. Rostow, Albert Hirschman, and Alexander Gerschenkron, to name a few, began their theorizing. "Political development" and "development economics" became serious academic fields. Theorists proposed strategies for development, methods of capital formation, the importance of human capital, the appropriate distribution of political authority, how to "get the institutions right," and so on.¹

A century earlier, when Japanese leaders began to think of the challenge of developing a society as advanced as Western industrial societies, there were few strategies to help them. What was the key to achieving Western wealth and power? Why had the scientific and industrial revolutions occurred in the West and not in Japan? The importance of Fukuzawa was that he provided answers to these questions that proved influential. His answers were more general and rough than those proposed by social scientists a century later, but they gave the Meiji leaders a valuable template to guide their efforts.

Craig has written a splendid monograph explaining Fukuzawa's pioneering thought on the process of what we now call "development." In doing his translation work in the 1860s, Fukuzawa came across the Scottish version of the stages of civilization through which nations had moved in their historical progression. The view that human societies moved from stages of savagery, barbarism, half-civilized, civilized, and enlightened was so universally accepted in the West that Fukuzawa first encountered it in nineteenth-century American geography textbooks. Pursuing the origins of this view in the writings of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Hill Burton, Francois Guizot, Henry Thomas Buckle, and other political economists, Fukuzawa was able to use their views to provide a framework within which to organize detailed patterns of history, explain fundamental historical processes, and provide a new paradigm for the future. Throughout, Craig is assiduous in showing from what ideas Fukuzawa's own thinking derived. We can trace Fukuzawa's engagement of different Western writers and, in Craig's meticulous examination, see how Fukuzawa adapted and manipulated his translations and melded the ideas of multiple writers to formulate his agenda for changing Japanese society.

Craig finds Bunmeiron no gairyakyu (1875) as perhaps "the most outstanding Japanese intellectual work of the past two centuries" (p. 3). It was the culminating work of the movement for "civilization and enlightenment." Fukuzawa's importance is evident in the different timing of the Japanese enlightenment. In the West, the scientific and industrial revolutions preceded the enlightenment, but in Japan the process was reversed and Fukuzawa's role became pivotal in providing a roadmap by which to realize the scientific and industrial revolutions. "Fukuzawa's pivotal role during this era was to explain to his countrymen what was happening, what it meant, and what they must do. It is impossible to think of a Western...