The Social Sciences in Modern Japan

This 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.