Germaine A. Hoston

How fruitfully can the notions of civil society and the public sphere be applied to non-Western societies that do not share the socio-historical characteristics that generated them in Western Europe? Critical examination of the particular versus the universal in the construction of modernity in the civil society/public sphere framework highlights the antinomies of Western-defined modernity, particularly that between the imperatives of effective centralized political authority and freedom of expression. Despite the virtual absence of any discussion of the Japanese public sphere, claims by some scholars that the concepts of civil society and the public sphere are inapplicable to non-Western societies, and assertions by Japan’s Civil Society School that Japan never developed a vibrant civil society, this study demonstrates that socioeconomic development in the Tokugawa era was accompanied by the emergence of autonomous associations and claims by merchants, other commoners, and samurai to a voice in deliberating on public matters. Such claims were both reflected in and encouraged by significant developments in Japanese political thought, revealing a new political consciousness among these groups. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions regarding pre-Meiji Japan and demonstrate how democratizing forces were forged in a context quite different from that described by Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor in Western Europe.

This article analyzes the remarkable congruence between the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and Mao Zedong regarding the role of consciousness, human will, and culture in socioeconomic change. These spiritual and humanistic concerns that are central to philosophical idealism were prominent in the young Marx’s writings, to which neither had access. Yet both theorists highlighted these elements as powerful, autonomous factors that can impede or accelerate socioeconomic change. It is argued that this congruence is best explained by the intersection of the Italian and Chinese philosophical traditions resulting from the impact of Neo-Confucianism on European idealist philosophy. While their work anticipated the cultural turn in leftist philosophy, it represents a nexus of Chinese and European humanistic and spiritual values that both challenges assumptions regarding the incommensurability of Eastern and Western philosophies and reaffirms the continued significance of these concerns for the continuing struggle between democratizing and authoritarian forces.

This article analyzes the influence of Chinese Neo-Confucianism on the development of German idealism. Information obtained by Leibniz from Jesuit missionaries included key concepts in Neo-Confucian philosophy that not only confirmed Leibniz’s belief in the universality of his organic image of the cosmos but also influenced Leibniz’s later writings. Such influence is also exhibited in Kant’s work, especially in his crucial noumenon-phenomenon distinction, as well as in Hegel’s phenomenology and philosophy of history. Recognition of these influences, unacknowledged by either Kant or Hegel, enhances our assessment of the import of both Neo-Confucianism and German idealism in international religio-philosophical discourse.

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.The main focus of the book is the thought of Kaiho Seiryō.1 Seiryō was inspired by two schools of thought that...