German Social Science, Meiji Conservatism, and the Peculiarities of Japanese History

An influential strand of Japanese historiography is invested in notions of peculiarity that highlight the deviance of Meiji Japan from Western liberal-democratic patterns. This special path is associated with the rising influence of the German Historical School of Economics. By analyzing the content of that influence and by maintaining a comparative perspective with the United States, Britain, and Germany, it is possible to highlight the worldwide demise of laissez-faire liberalism and the emergence in the 1880s of an international community of social reformers influenced by the Historical School, thus affirming the intellectual plurality and multiple political valence of this tradition of economic thought.