The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions(Contemporary Eastern Studies)

ENGThis incisive intellectual history of Japanese social science from the 1890s to the present day considers the various forms of modernity that the processes of “development” or “rationalization” have engendered and the role social scientists have played in their emergence. Andrew E. Barshay argues that Japan, together with Germany and pre- revolutionary Russia, represented forms of “developmental alienation” from the Atlantic Rim symptomatic of late-emerging empires. Neither members nor colonies of the Atlantic Rim, these were independent national societies whose cultural self-image was inescapably marked by a sense of difference from the ostensibly advanced societies that provided the late-comers with the institutional models they sought to follow— or reject. Building on a historical overview of major Japanese trends, Barshay focuses on two of the most powerful streams of Japanese social science, one associated with Marxism, the other with Modernism (kindaishugi), whose most representative figure is the late Maruyama Masao. Demonstrating that a sense of developmental alienation shaped the thinking of social scientists in both streams, the author argues that they together provided Japanese social science—and indeed the wider society itself—with moments of shared self-understanding. The book ends with a question for others to answer: if the condition of developmental alienation in Japan has been resolved, what is the purpose and orientation of social science now? RUS В своей книге Эндрю Баршай представляет исторический обзор основных японских социологических тенденций с 1890-х годов до наших дней и рассматривает два наиболее мощных течения японской социальной науки. Одно из них связано с марксизмом, а другое — с модернизмом (киндайсюги). Демонстрируя, как чувство отчуждения японцев от стран Атлантического кольца формировало мышление социологов обоих течений, автор утверждает, что, несмотря на все различия, они придали японской социальной науке единство и общее самопонимание.

About the Author :
ENGAndrew E. Barshay teaches modern Japanese history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of three books. The first, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (UC Press, 1988), explored the notion of the “public” in imperial Japan, finding it to have been hegemonized by the state, and left open to remaking by Japan’s defeat. The second, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions (UC Press, 2004), turned to the idea of developmental backwardness or lateness in Japan and tracked its persistence among social thinkers and social scientists from the 1890s and across the divide of 1945. The most recent, The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945-1956 (UC Press, 2013) delved into the experience of imperial collapse through a study of the internment in Siberian labor camps and eventual repatriation of some 600,000 captured soldiers of Japan’s Kwantung Army. In his current research, Barshay uses the history of Japan’s national railway system to understand how Japanese society remade itself in the wake of catastrophic defeat in 1945. RUS Эндрю Баршай — профессор на кафедре истории Калифорнийского университета. В сфере научных интересов — общественная мысль, модернизм, общественные науки в современной Японии, марксизм, история Японии, японо-российские отношения.