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

This study of Fukuzawa Yukichi's view of civilization and progress examines what Fukuzawa learned from Western books on theories of civilization and how he expressed this knowledge in his own works, notably Seiyō jijō (Conditions in the West) and Bunmeiron no gairyaku (Outline of Theories of Civilization). In Japan, Western influence on Fukuzawa's thought has long been a popular topic in research on modern Japanese intellectual history, with numerous studies published to date.¹ Surprisingly, however, scholars outside Japan have not explored this subject to any great extent.²

The author, Albert Craig, is a leading expert on the history of the Meiji Restoration. In this book, however, he does not present a grand-scale view of the political and social changes that took place as part of Japan's modernization. Instead, he traces the intellectual thread from the Scottish enlightenment of the eighteenth century to Fukuzawa's social and historical thought, illuminating with much concrete evidence the various dimensions of Fukuzawa's interaction with Western ideas.

I still remember the impact I felt upon encountering, more than a decade ago, an essay by Craig on John Hill Burton (1809-1881) and Fukuzawa.³ In that piece, an earlier version of chapter 3 of this book, Craig identified Burton as the writer of Political Economy for Use in Schools and for Private Instruction (a textbook published in 1852 by the Edinburgh publishing house of William and Robert Chambers as part of its "Chambers's Educational Course"). This textbook "came as a revelation" (p. 58) to Fukuzawa, and he translated a substantial part of it in 1868 as an appendix to Conditions in the West. Japanese researchers were already aware that Fukuzawa's choice of terms, including, in some cases, the coining of new words to render Western institutions and concepts, showed his deep understanding of modern Western political and economic systems, but Craig's essay clarified in greater detail how Fukuzawa understood and sympathized with the Scottish Enlightenment's view of "civilization," rather than with Western civilization in general, as well as his strategy for "enlightening" Japanese society. Craig rigorously probed Burton's intellectual background and, as a result, proved successfully that this rather obscure writer's textbook was Fukuzawa's most important medium for understanding the Scottish theory of civilization. ⁴ Not only the chapter on Burton but the book as a whole draws on a variety of primary sources that Craig surveyed in many archives and collections in Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Nowhere does Craig show off by calling the reader's attention to the information he has excavated, but his efforts are readily detectable in the meticulous references, which provide a solid foundation for the book's arguments.

The first chapter gives an overview of the theories of the development of civilization propounded by Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar, who were among the leading figures of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. These three thinkers shared the view that civilization developed seamlessly, without any dramatic turning points, progressing from an age of hunters to a commercial society. They rejected the idea of a "state of nature" and claimed that the laws of progress could be discovered by observing the facts of human societies. Moreover, they held, progress was always linear. Differences of character from one society to another were only a matter of time—i.e., stage of development—or variations caused by geographical or other conditions. Craig points out that Fukuzawa learned this perspective from several different sources, including books by the American educator and reformer Francis Wayland and the English legal scholar William Blackstone as well as by Burton. While in their writings Blackstone conveyed the older ideas of social contract and "state of nature" and Wayland "drew heavily on" the ideas of the eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers (p. 29), Burton, on the other hand, added an updated version of developmental theory. Accordingly, "nineteenth-century...