Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science

David Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134833597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The central argument of Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science is that Eurocentric blindness is not a moral but a scientific failing. In this wide-ranging critique of Western social science, Anglo-American philosophy and French theory, Williams works on the premise that Japan is the most important political system of our time. He explains why social scientists have been so keen to ignore or denigrate Japan's achievements. If social science is to meet the needs of the `Pacific Century', it requires a sustained act of intellectual demolition and subsequent renewal.

Part I
Japan: the splendour of its prime

Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime

Shelley

1 Japan and the European political canon

What is important is not what other people make of us, but what we ourselves make of what they have made of us.

Sartre

A PLACE IN THE PANTHEON

The twentieth century has given the Japanese a unique taste of greatness. Nothing in that Asian society’s thirteen hundred years of recorded history matches what it has accomplished in recent times. This achievement has universal reach. It qualifies Japan for a place of honour in the world’s pantheon of political systems or polities. With proper recognition, post-war Japan will remain an object of mature thought long after the present golden age has passed. We will remember it, as we remember Athens, the Roman Republic and Renaissance Florence.

In each of these canonic examples, be it a city-state or an empire, the polity embodies a triumph of experience mediated by a supreme example of textual reflection. Classical Athenians, Republican Romans and Renaissance Florentines all made history, but this making was enhanced because within the walls of these communities could be found a Plato, a Cicero and a Machiavelli. Thought confirms the deed. What Plato achieved for the Athenian polis, or Hobbes for the England of the Civil War, or Alexander Hamilton for the new American republic must now be wrung from the postwar Japanese miracle.

To seek to win a place for modern Japan in the canon of Western political philosophy is no small undertaking. Indeed this venture will succeed only if many minds become convinced that the European tradition of political theory, initiated by Thucydides and Plato, will remain incomplete without the ingestion of the Japanese experience of government. But if we are to deposit something resistant and Oriental beneath the skin of the Western tradition of political thought, then we must first banish the obscuring hubris of ‘Orientalist’ assumption that prevails in Western social science. The limitations of a vast discourse must be overcome. But the most invidious of these limits is the axiom of Asian quiescence.

Without significant exception the universalizing discourses of modern Europe and the United States assume the silence, willing or otherwise, of the non-European world. There is incorporation; there is inclusion; there is direct rule; there is coercion. But there is only infrequently an acknowledgment that the colonized people should be heard from, their ideas known.¹

The force of Edward Said’s censure is in no way diminished by the fact that the Japanese narrowly escaped colonization. Japan’s classic moment has been denied; its silence has been assumed. Science is at work in this hubris. Western assumptions of civilized superiority are grounded in our methods of grasping the truth. These encourage us to ignore the fact that the non-European world has generated no other political system that presses upon Western sensibility with as much ontological weight as that of modern Japan. Such willful European blindness lends credence to Jacques Derrida’s provocative suggestion that philosophy—that elaborate structure of thought, nursed into glory over the past twenty-five centuries—is merely ‘White metaphysics’. Derrida is mistaken; but the only way for the Western student of Asia to prove that Derrida is wrong about philosophy and social science is to grind a fresh set of lenses through which to peruse the theories and institutions that have nourished the Japanese miracle. One claim can, however, no longer be resisted. The time for Japanese ideas to be heard has arrived.

Even here, a dark note must be sounded. It is almost impossible for an educated European to imagine the depth of emotion that this Japanese apotheosis may spark among alert non-Europeans. The hitherto unrivalled excellence of European political philosophy has depressed Asian political thinkers even when it has spurred them to greater effort. Sakai Naoki has observed that Japanese writers on the intellectual history of their country (Nihon shiso-shi) are haunted by a spectral presence that is almost always an absence: the idealized Western reader.² For the striving Japanese intellectual it is the Western reader who has embodied the highest standards. It is he who must be appeased.

Such dependence not only breeds anti-European resentment, it also subverts the pursuit of Asian excellence. But the hurt is real. It encourages Asian thinkers on politics to mimic the psychology of a son of a father who neglects his child’s small victories. The paternal recognition that is sought is never given. The superiority of European tradition has spawned an apparently callous complacency, which has littered the Western canon of philosophic and political analysis with traps and humiliations for the thoughtful Asian. The confident assertion of European centrality suggested in the epigram of Léon Brunschvicg, the French neo-Kantian philosopher, that ‘The history of Egypt is the history of Egyptology’ exasperates the non-Western sensibility. It is one of those confident observations that lends persuasiveness to Sakai’s charge that Eurocentrism would deny the non-Westerner his own subjectivity.

A Japanese apotheosis today would send a quiet surge of pride through the non-European world of thought and letters, much as the triumph of Japanese arms over Russia in 1905 bolstered the still fitful confidence of anti-colonial nationalists when the star of European imperial supremacy still reigned. But Japan’s triumph is not a matter of significance for non-Europeans alone. It offers a classic occasion for Western thinking of the first rank. Any European willing to examine the Japanese achievement, fairly and openly, will find the geography of his spirit enhanced and enriched. This is in no small part because the recognition of Japan’s success demands, as was true of Locke, a two-pronged effort: substantive political theorizing and a fresh assault on methods. Only by curbing the claims of the dominant methodological schools of Western social science will a place be won for Japan in the pantheon of classic political systems.

The dialectic of deed and thought, phenomena and text, should urge us to ponder afresh the ways that the political and economic trajectory of modern Japan defies some of Western social science’s most cherished epistemological and ontological postulates. The Japanese experiment should encourage a revolt against key aspects of twentieth-century science and theory. But the first target of any such critique should be the governing assumption of Japanology: a European studies Japan to understand only Japan. Rather one should study Japan to understand the totality of human experience, not because Japan is part of the whole, but because the Japanese example illuminates the whole.

THE CANONIC WOUND

Japan stands at the spear point of a larger endeavour. The modern phase of this enterprise begins, for many, with Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). This German Romantic thinker sought to give the search for a bond ‘between a people and the majestic projects of philosophy, literature, and the arts’ primacy in the ambitions of the intellect.³ In his essay ‘African-American philosophy?’, K. Anthony Appiah identifies the injury that such ambition would heal:

Few black philosophers are undisturbed when they discover the moments when Africa is banished from Hegel’s universal history and when Hume declares, in the essay on ‘National Characters’, that blacks are incapable of eminence in action or speculation (likening in the same place Francis Williams, the Jamaican poet, to a ‘parrot who speaks a few words plainly.’).⁴

The remedy for such humiliation lies in practical and mental achievement. The claims of shared identity motivate this drive to ‘find something in Africa that deserves the dignity; that warrants the respect that we have been taught (in our western or westernized schools and colleges) is due to Plato and Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel’.⁵ Japan’s modern century merits such dignity, certainly in the contest of mind that is political philosophy.

The main currents of twentieth-century social science and philosophy, both Anglo-American and French, are unsympathetic to this non-European quest for canonic dignity. Positivists, behaviourists and post-structuralists have all sought to throttle Herder’s crusade by disembowelling the political canon just as the non-Westerner would take the field. But unless we would conspire to drown our community in the waters of oblivion, the post-structuralist celebration of ‘the death of the author’ must be judged as an act of collective self-mutilation.

Pedagogic necessity and the weight of tradition have fortunately blunted this attempt to ‘dethrone’ the great texts of Europe’s sustained meditation on government and politics since Pericles.⁶ Despite the doubts that logical positivists have fanned about the methodological purity and philosophic rigour of the traditional pantheon of Western political theory, the centre has held. As a result, there is a wide consensus, even among those who would bury the political classic, about which texts find their natural place in this canon. Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Hobbes’ Leviathan, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Rousseau’s Social Contract and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right are all masterpieces in this tradition, where the word ‘tradition’ highlights, for example, the web of influence that links John Rawls to Rousseau, and Rousseau to St Augustine.⁷

In labouring to redress the imbalance between the classical centre and the intellectual bankruptcy of underdevelopment, the cultural nationalist brings a sharp reading to bear upon this tradition. To stanch what Sir Isaiah Berlin calls a ‘wounded cultural pride’, the nationalist strives to elaborate a ‘philosophic-historical vision’, and thus create ‘an inner focus of resistance’.⁸

This precise economy of need rightly seizes on the communal or nationalist dynamic at work in the canon. To the degree that the towering monuments of European Romanticism are the products of a cultural revolt by Germans—‘the first true nationalists’—against French classicism, Romantic philosophy offers a decisive demonstration that competitive rivalry between communities can also feed creativity of the first order.⁹ National schools, in philosophy, painting and scholarship, are the contentious fruit of this current in thought and feeling.

Herder’s nationalist dream of cultural autonomy unites the communal need for reasoned self-regard, even collective survival, with the creative compulsion towards mastering excellence in the individual thinker. It is no accident that the canon of Western political philosophy radically privileges the pivotal relationship that binds the polity to the political thinker. Thus, the flux of Athenian politics may be the immediate occasion of Plato’s prescriptions, but we remember Athens and assign to it a strict canonic pre-eminence because Plato made it an object of classic political reflection. The greatness of the polity shines through the text that outlives it, just as The Republic has outlived the greatest Athenian of the greatest age of Athens.

The radical dependence of the thinker on his polity and of polity on the thinker is the defining dynamic of canonicity. Thus Hobbes viewed English royal prerogatives as a solution to his philosophic problem while Locke saw such absolutism as a danger to be resisted, but the state of English politics— the Civil War has been called ‘a forcing house of European significance for political theory’— provided an indispensable context and occasion for their political and philosophic meditations.¹⁰ No doubt a complex lap of wave upon wave, across the centuries, links the shores of English politics today with those of the Civil War, but over the huge expanse of historical cause and effect, The Leviathan and Two Treatises of Government shine their canonic messages like the distant signals of a powerful lighthouse.

To become a classic, a text must transcend its original context. But to begin life at all, the text must be born in the full exploitation of its surroundings. Rawls’ A Theory of Justice is inconceivable outside the philosophic ambit of American-style liberalism.¹¹ The impact of the Vietnam War on the final phase of the composition of Rawls’ masterpiece was decisive. Indeed there are grounds to argue that the intellectually most bracing response to the bloody contest of national character that America endured in Indochina is to be found not in film or reportage— not in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, nor Oliver Stone’s Platoon, nor Michael Herr’s Dispatches nor David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest —but rather in the core section of A Theory of Justice which addresses the vexed question of civil disobedience and resistance to the military draft. American politics of the 1950s and 1960s has proved to be textually fertile. Rawls’ classic, this canonic nomination, must now face the test of the centuries. A Theory of Justice may yet prove to be the one great monument of unageing intellect to be born from the agony of the Vietnam War.

A canonic triumph demands that the political thinker and the polity fuse in rare mental congruence. Just as A Theory of Justice may be twentieth-century America’s leading candidate for a place in the pantheon, the summits of which extend from The Republic to Das Kapital, so a parallel quest must be set in motion to generate a text capable of responding fully to Japan’s twentieth-century accomplishments as a polity. The ultimate goal is to produce a classic on Japan worthy to grace the company of The Politics, The Leviathan and The Social Contract.

None of the mainstream disciplines that form the bulwark of social science have sought to contribute to the fulfilment of this textual ambition. In the name of methodological certitude and factual hunger, certain branches of Western positivism and empiricism would urge us to ignore Japan’s canonic potential. Anglo-American economists, in particular, have persuaded an entire generation of Japanese social scientists that Japan’s modern century is, in canonic terms, derivative and marginal. Even in the political science of Japan, one of the few Western disciplines where the contrary case has been argued, the canonic impulse has been quickly smothered by misdirected empiricism. Such occultation must be resisted.

If Japan’s canonicity is to be fully mastered and properly honoured, then a clearing—Heidegger’s pregnant word is Lichtung— must be opened in the midst of this thicket of methodological and scientific obstacles. The resulting ‘site’, to adopt an idea of Derrida, will be bounded by several well-established academic disciplines but must be a colony of none of them. Such freedom is essential if the fetid air of our positivist and empiric slumbers is to be cleared so that a fresh scientific beginning may be made. Kant spoke of a Kampfplatz, a place of philosophic battle, and in its first methodological phase— its Methodenstreit —a genuine Japanese classicism will require such a battlefield. A perspicuous grasp of our post-positivist condition is indispensable. Two conflicting psychologies are at work in our need for a conceptually liberating horizon. One impulse is French and speaks the language of Gaston Bachelard when he insists that science progresses only by making total epistemic breaks with the reigning orthodoxy. This would have us strike out, with force and precision, at the philosophic enemies of Japanese canonicity, whether they be European, American or Japanese. But the second impulse is different, and might be called ‘English’ in its insistence that quiet reform is the truest, because most lasting, remedy for an occulted Japan. The English school reminds us that we are doomed by time and circumstance to be influenced by our well-established, if hostile, academic neighbours. They include, most notably, positivist political science; the classical school of British political economy, from Adam Smith to Alfred Marshall; philosophic positivists such as John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and their followers; and French structuralists and deconstructionists, who contend, with Edward Said, that area studies in the West is the perverse outcropping of the ‘Orientalist’ ideology.

Successful navigation around these continents of discourse will be a formidable exercise of mind. Like the Sirens, as Cicero warned, the powers of fatal attraction of these sciences are to be found not ‘in the sweetness of their voices or the novelty and diversity of their songs, but in their professions of knowledge’.¹² At the outset, therefore, a certain deafness is in order if we are, in the words of Walter of Chatillon, to ‘seek out those who dwell under another sun’.¹³

ANCIENT WORLDS, MODERN TEXTS

Paul Mus, the French student of Indochinese societies, used to recount an anecdote to illustrate the philosophic sources of Vietnam’s impotence before the assault of European technology. ‘When a French steamship was sighted off the shores of Vietnam in the early nineteenth century, the local mandarin-governor, instead of going to see it, researched the phenomenon in his texts, concluded it was a dragon, ...