Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how Meiji intellectuals appropriated Enlightenment authors and reconfigured their relationship to their European philosophical tradition by means of the case study of Rousseau and Machiavelli. The paper focuses on Nakae Chōmin, Kuga Katsunan, Inoue Kowashi, and Hayashi Tadasu.

Paper long abstract:

While authors from the Enlightenment such as Rousseau, Kant and Smith played a fundamental role when they entered Japan, shortly after the Meiji Restoration, they tended to come all together, outside of their historical order. Their Japanese interpreters often ignored—by fault or by choice—the historicity of the relationships between their theories. Moreover, it is worthy of consideration that the Meiji era Japanese scholars reinterpreted or ignored the relationships the philosophes had created between their thought and the philosophical, religious and intellectual tradition which preceded them. In early Meiji era Japan, the Enlightenment had no clear roots or past. While this made of it a tool which was adaptable to the current Japanese predicament, it stripped it of its problematic but defining relationship to the past.

To illuminate the effects of this, I will explore one case study: the transformation of the relationship between Rousseau and Machiavelli in Meiji literature. Notoriously, Rousseau—in continuity with a tradition centred in Spinoza's political thought—praised Machiavelli's work, and especially his Prince, as a satire of tyranny. At the same time, Rousseau struggled to reconcile his republicanism with Machiavelli's, avoiding to openly criticise the different relationship between personal and public morals sketched in the work of the Italian thinker.

In Meiji Japan, both Rousseau and Machiavelli enjoyed a considerable fortune. They came to represent two different sides of the debate on government. Rousseau, with whom Nakae Chōmin openly identified, became an important source for Kuga Katsunan as well. Kuga, another supporter of people's rights, openly criticised Machiavelli. The latter became the epitome of the patriotic politician for his two most important interpreters: Inoue Kowashi, the man behind the Meiji constitution, and Hayashi Tadasu, the first Japanese ambassador to London and a minister in different cabinets. The aim of the paper is to analyse, in the framework of Meiji era's debate on the future of the nation, the meaning of the breaking up of the problematic relationship Rousseau-Machiavelli shaped by Roussau himself and the establishment of a new dynamic between the two authors.