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  • Une modernité indigène: Ruptures et innovations dans les théories politiques japonaise du xviiie siècle (An indigenous modernity: Discontinuity and innovation in eighteenth-century Japanese political theory) by Olivier Ansart
  • Germaine A. Hoston (bio)
Une modernité indigène: Ruptures et innovations dans les théories politiques japonaise du xviiie siècle (An indigenous modernity: Discontinuity and innovation in eighteenth-century Japanese political theory). By Olivier Ansart. Collection Japon, vol. 21. Paris: Éditions Les Belles Lettres, 2014. Pp. 292. €35,5, isbn 978-2-251-72220-7.

Une modernité indigène: Ruptures et innovations dans les théories politiques japonaise du xviiie siècle, by Olivier Ansart, is a thoughtful, elegantly written book that offers valuable insights into Japanese political thought in an era that culminated in the Meiji Restoration. Despite the specific characteristics of the rigid centralized feudal structure of Tokugawa society, Ansart argues, political ideas generally associated with the advent of “modernity” in the West were generated indigenously in a context in which knowledge of the West was limited primarily to science and technology (p. 15). [End Page 1029]

The main focus of the book is the thought of Kaiho Seiryō (1755–1817).1 Seiryō was inspired by two schools of thought that had been opposed to each other until he synthesized them: those of Dazai Shundai (1680–1747), who reassessed the legitimacy of profit and trade (p. 16), and the “bourgeois Confucianism” of Yamagata Bantō (1748–1821). Other thinkers made advances in criticizing the “traditional” “naturalist paradigm,” but remained within the rigid class framework of Tokugawa society. By contrast, Seiryō’s assertion—that government was needed to ensure that the passions (désirs) that lead men away from the virtue that thinkers within the Confucian and Neo-Confucian system emphasized according to the paradigms that had dominated Japan’s philosophical landscape—offered these thinkers a new moral psychology that liberated them from the existing framework. The new model allowed them to build an alternative political theory based on objectives that were consistent with what would become the new objective of those who would make national prosperity (fukoku) the goal of the Meiji Restoration.

Ansart asserts that “modern political theory” “is a theory that sets forth the terms and conditions of distribution of tangible and intangible items that are characteristic of modern societies” (p. 18). This definition raises issues with regard to the book’s central argument. First, Anglo-American theorists generally demarcate modern from premodern theory more in terms of the severance from political prescriptions, with Machiavelli’s redefinition of virtú as the skill of the Prince in ensuring the permanence of his power, and thus the primacy of raison d’état. In addition, the ancients saw good as what was natural, in contrast to modern theorists such as the social contract theorists, who established the legitimacy of the polity on the basis of the fact that it was an artifice, a product of human reason. Albeit outside his discussion of the nature of modernity, Ansart does emphasize the significance of the “Naturalist Paradigm” in premodern Japanese thought. He also notes the significance of industrialization and urbanization, in which the terms and conditions regarding the distribution of property are determined by implicit or explicit negotiations and agreements. Finally, Ansart stresses the role of the individual as a major factor in the “rupture moderne” (the discontinuity or “break” that defines modernity) (pp. 15–19).

Ansart thus emphasizes that new thinking about the possibilities of more appropriate processes for distributing property involved critical thinking about human psychology. The backdrop for this was the establishment of the rational school of Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi as orthodoxy through an edict issued in 1790 by the Tokugawa shogunate, which also prohibited any “heterodox” teachings. Neo-Confucianism had initially been greeted in Japan with considerable hostility, as evidenced by the thought of Yamaga Sokō, Itō Jinsai, and Ogyū Sorai. While others (e.g., Maruyama Masao) have asserted that Sokō’s thought marked a transition between naturalism and positivism in Zhu Xi’s thought and identified Sorai as Japan’s first modern political thinker, Ansart disagrees with this view. For Sokō, he claims, it was ultimately the will...

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