Keiichi Matsushita’s Mass Society Theory: A Case of Leftist Democratic Theory in Post-War Japan

Ryusaku YAMADA, Ph.D. Associate Professor in Politics

Nihon University College of International Relations 2-31-145 Bunkyo-cho, Mishima-shi,

Shizuoka 411-8555, Japan E-mail: ryamada@ir.nihon-u.ac.jp

Prepared for delivery at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,

Philadelphia, August 31st - September 3rd, 2006

Copyright by the American Political Science Association

Draft only: do not cite without the author’s permission

Abstract: There are several points that represent the significance of the study of Keiichi Matsushita’s theory of mass society today: (1) Matsushita’s mass society theory in the 1950s was not a mere introduction of western mass society arguments but, under the strong influence of Marxian ideas (though he himself was not Marxist), he elaborated his own distinctive mass society theory; (2) Matsushita’s understanding of Marx was different from that of Stalinism, and he situated Marxism and socialism in modern European political theory since John Locke, the theory that he called “civic political theory”; and (3) Matsushita’s leftist idea of mass society and democracy in the 1950s had resemblance to European leftist radical democracy over the conception of socialism and civil society.

Key Words: mass society, mass democracy, radical democracy, civil society

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Keiichi Matsushita’s Mass Society Theory: A Case of Leftist Democratic Theory in Post-War Japan

Ryusaku Yamada, Ph.D.

Associate Professor in Politics Nihon University College of International Relations

Arguments about “mass society” could be found universally in Western industrialized

countries with many varieties from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s. However, the

Japanese arguments in the 1950s had a unique character. The reason lies in the fact that

Marxism overwhelmingly influenced modern Japanese social sciences since the 1920s. This

does not mean that all Japanese social scientists were Marxists, but it is also true that, between

the era before the Second World War and around the 1960s, both Marxists and non-Marxists in

Japan tended to share the basic understanding that social science is Marxism, or that Marxism

established a genuine social science. The influence of Marxism over Japanese social sciences

became weak at the end of the 1960s and was minimized in the 1980s. But, during the 1950s,

the academic atmosphere was dominated by the feeling that they could not say anything

without Marxism. And what was remarkable is that the “Debate on Mass Society” in 1956

and 1957 was carried on between theorists of mass society and Marxists in Japan.

The central figure of the “Debate” was Keiichi Matsushita (1928- ), a Japanese political

theorist. There are several reasons why Matsushita’s theory of mass society is worth being known

to English-speaking world today. First, his theory was of highly Marxian kind. While he

himself was not a Marxist and was very critical of Stalinist Marxism, he regarded theories by

Marx and Lenin as social theories of industrial society and repeatedly identified their

significance in theorizing about “contemporary society” in the twentieth century. While

many Western theorists of mass society tended to describe mass society as an amorphous

“classless society”,1 Matsushita did not deny the capitalistic class relationship but built

Marxian class theory in his mass society theory. Such theory of mass society seems quite

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unique, and it is difficult to say that even Japanese political and sociological theorists have

sufficiently understood his theory.

Second, Matsushita’s theoretical insight into the relation between socialism and

democracy in his mass society theory seems significant. He advocated a kind of socialism

that could cope with the reality of mass society, neither a form of communism that totally

denied democracy, nor a social democracy that compromised with capitalism. For him,

contemporary society faced a “double alienation”: “capitalistic alienation” and “alienation of

mass society”; and the role of both political theorists and socialists was to find a way to

overcome this double alienation. His ideas in the 1950s seem to parallel European arguments

of radical democracy during the 1980s and 1990s.

Matsushita is an example of Japanese political scientists who develop original

political theory, while many of them tend to just introduce or translate novel Western

arguments into Japan. The purpose of this paper is to examine Matsushita’s unique theory of

mass society in order to prepare for the further discussion of Japanese arguments on

democracy in English-speaking world and to provide a common field that would enable a

comparative study of Western and Japanese arguments about democracy and civil society.

Context and Terms: Mass, Citizen, Public, Private

After its defeat in the Second World War in 1945, Japan established a democratic

Constitution under the US occupation, and people began to enjoy individual freedom and

full-dress democracy. However, though Japanese politics surely has a democratic system of

universal suffrage, plural political parties, and a parliament, what distinguishes it from Western

democratic experiences seems to be the lack of the notion that common people constitute the

public sphere from below. What has always been questioned during the post-war period is

the indifference of Japanese people to public affairs, e.g., “political apathy”, “centrism of

private lives”, “me-ism” and so on. It was arguments about mass society in a broad sense that

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originally brought up in the field of political and sociological studies the problems of political

apathy and people’s centrism of private lives in post-war Japan

The equivalent of mass or the masses in Japanese is “taishū”, and mass society is

translated as “taishū shakai” (“shakai” is “society”). Originally, however, the word “taishū”

is not an academic term. In general, “taishū” represents something qualitatively popular, not

highbrow, and quantitatively massive. Chiefly, the word is a noun with the meaning of

common people. It includes both the negative sense of lower, unsophisticated, and

sometimes ignorant and barbarous people, and the much more humanistic sense of “loveable

commonality”.2 Among political and sociological theorists in Japan, “taishū” often meant

people who lose public interest, who are privatized, and who are easily manipulated by

political power.

The main issue of mass society the Japanese theorists were interested in during the

1950s and 1960s was the danger of fascism and conformism, in which the political

participation of the masses through universal suffrage brought about the ruler’s manipulation

with the technology of mass communication. Many Japanese political students considered

how to overcome the situation of mass society and mass democracy: in other word, how to

realize “civil society” (“shimin shakai”) in Japan. “Shimin” is the equivalent of “citizen”.

For Japanese intellectuals who know the Latin word “Civitas” as the root of “citizen”,

“shimin” means people who are concerned with public matters and participate in the public

sphere voluntarily and actively. Japanese history seldom had such “citizens” because

Japanese people tend to be obedient to authority. In both pre- and post-war periods, Japanese

politics was accompanied by a deep-rooted image that people are not informed about political

and social facts and that elites always make decisions. So, how to realize civil society was

the same issue of how to render privatized and apathetic “taishū” into active “shimin”.3

The Japanese equivalent of “public” is “ooyake” (or “kō”). However, the Japanese

concept of “ooyake” does not necessarily mean “public” in the sense of openness for all. It

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also means “authority” like government or the state power, and it is also an equivalent of

“official” in the sense of authorization by the government. There are several words that

include “ooyake” or “kō”: e. g., “kōkyō” (public) or “kōkyō-sei” (publicness). Japanese

people have a common sense that these words imply something concerned with society and

community. But, at the same time, they usually take it for granted that the government or the

state monopolizes the publicness. Japanese “ooyake”, “kōkyō” and “kōkyō-sei” imply the

sense that “official authority should take charge of public matters”, that “we can rely on

authority”, and that “anything that is not authorized is not worthy of trust or belief”.

On the other hand, “private” is “watakushi” (or “shi”). While “ooyake” means

“authority” or “official”, “watakushi” implies “unofficial”, “arbitrary”, “selfish” or

“unreliable”. It has the negative implication of “self-centered interest”. For example, when

people object to the government’s planning of the construction of motorways or airports, the

Japanese government and mass media have often criticized such people as “egoists who ignore

the public welfare”. Here, the word “publicness” (“kōkyō-sei”) is not a principle of people’s

rights but a term that limits them and demands the faith of obligation. The state and the

government are regarded as if they were the exclusive bodies in charge of “kōkyō-sei”, and

those who oppose them are seen as selfish egoists.4

Moreover, “watakushi” means “the self” and “the individual”, as well as “private”.

This seems to result in Japanese people often confusing and hardly distinguishing between

“individual” and “private”. Here, to be individualistic tends to mean directly to be privatized

and to lose any interest in public matters. For Japanese, a word “individualist” often

connoted those who retreat from group activities, or even from human relationship. It is not

so common for them in general that the independent and autonomous individual actively

participates in public sphere.

Likewise, the Japanese notion of “ooyake” (public) is strongly connected with the

notion of “the state.” Therefore, it is difficult for Japanese people in general to imagine a

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society that is autonomous from the state, and to distinguish between “kokka” (the state),

“kuni” (country), “shakai” (society) and “kyōdō-tai” (community). So, on the one hand,

conservative and nationalistic politicians and intellectuals often complained that the young

generation after the Second World War has become selfish and lost the sense of “publicness”

through democracy; and they have repeatedly advocated the revival of traditional moral

education in order to insinuate into people the “virtue” of discounting private lives and serving

the state. On the other hand, those who pursue individual freedom did (and do) not usually

distinguish between “to be individual” and “to be private”, and a rejection of sacrifice for the

state and traditional societies as in the pre-war period often brought about the attitude of

“escape from politics, from public matters, and from the state” that accompanied concentration

on the private sphere. Here we can see the dichotomy of “public = the state” and “private =

non-state and non-politics”, both of which are not mediated.

It seems that this either/or choice of public and private influenced the Japanese

understanding of democracy. Democratization after the Second World War realized

individuals’ freedom and emancipation. In pre-war Japan, people had served the state as the

subjects of the Emperor. On the other hand, in post-war Japan, people wanted to escape from

political power or the state and needed some solid shelter to protect their private lives against

the government. This was the transformation of values in society from “extinguishing the

self in service to the state” (“messhi hōkō”) to “extinguishing the public in service to the self”

(“mekkō hōshi”). Here, Japanese idea of democracy lacked the notion of “civil society” as a

free public sphere based on people’s spontaneous activities.

Matsushita’s Historical View and Framework

Now let us begin with a close examination of Keiichi Matsushita’s mass society

theory. According to Matsushita, the purpose of his mass society theory was to theorize

about the structural transformation of political theories in Europe and America at the beginning

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of the twentieth century:

What I want to question here is the reason why, in the stage of monopoly capitalism in the twentieth

century, the theoretical structure of theorists in Europe and America [K. Mannheim, E. Lederer, G. Wallas, W. Lippman, J. Dewey and so on] became different from the one in the nineteenth century. The reason why broad social theories of this century, from fascist to socialist, came to have different

characteristics from theory in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, as Lenin says, the time of this transformation of social theories corresponds to the time of “the split” of socialism...Why is Leninism, which could unify syndicalism and Spartacism through the Comintern, called a development of

Marxism?5

Matsushita said that what was to be questioned was the historical basis of the change

of the theory: why a mass society was formed and why, then, Marxism was also developed into

Leninism. “If an existence is reflected in a theory, a change of theory should mean a change

of existence itself”.6 His answer to the question “what of the existence changed?” was “the

formation of the mass society that accompanied the switchover to the stage of monopoly

capitalism, and the establishment of the state of the masses that corresponded to this”.

Matsushita’s theory attempted to explain the social structure of the stage of monopoly

capitalism that brought about a mass society, and the framework or analysis for grasping the

social structure. He formulated a chart of the transformation of social structure:

I. The proletarianization of a massive population, the core of which is the working class, II. The leap in mass production and the mass communication which accompanies the socialization of technology, and III. The political levelling of each traditional social stratum, based on I and II.7

For him, this chart is universally seen to be the stage of monopoly capitalism regardless of the

economic system, capitalist or communist.

Matsushita also proposed the threefold theoretical framework to analyze the stage of

monopoly capitalism: “Economic Structure – Form of Society – Political System”. Within

this framework, he conceived of his historical view as:

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Economic Structure Form of Society Political System

The Modern (The nineteenth century)

industrial capitalism civil/bourgeois society (shimin shakai)

the state of the citizen (shimin kokka)

The Contemporary (The twentieth century)

monopoly capitalism mass society (taishū shakai)

the state of the masses (taishū kokka)

Matsushita conceived that the socialization (Vergesellschaftung) of production at the stage of

monopoly capitalism and the high advancement of technology in the so-called second

industrial revolution (that Marx had not be able to predict) brought about a different form of

society in the twentieth century from the stage of industrial capitalism, a form of mass society.

Thus, by using the schematic form above, he regarded the twentieth century as the age of the

“contemporary” that could be distinguished from the age of the “modern”, and attempted to

theorize about the “contemporary”.

Matsushita presupposed the relative autonomy of the “logic of politics” in relation to the

“logic of economy”. In other words, even if it should be true that the capitalist economy

ultimately prescribed politics and society, the political process itself was swayed by each situation

and political conduct to search for any possibility (“the art of the possible”). “We cannot propose

an effective theory of tactics or organization in political process only through the exposure of class

conflict”8 and, therefore, political process must be theorized about in the different dimension of

“inevitability” brought about by the economic structure.9

The Ruin of Civil Society: The Change of the Form of Society

What did Matsushita mean by the transformation of the form of society and people in

the stage of monopoly capitalism? Referring to Marx’s Capital, Matsushita conceived of the

advancement of the forces of production as a cause of the ruin of civil/bourgeois society.

According to Matsushita, the advancement of the forces of production and capitalist free

competition brought about the concentration of capital. The consequence of this was the

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establishment of the joint-stock companies system that adhered to finance capital; joint-stock

companies were not personal but social corporations or Gesellschaft, which realized

“socialized production” through denying the traditional sense of capitalism, e.g. private

ownership and individual isolated labor. Then appeared a massive proletariat that had no

control or ownership of the means of production. Therefore, in the stage of monopoly

capitalism, the notion of “civil society” on the assumption of bourgeoisie as citizens (free,

equal and independent individual) was destroyed. Moreover, (as mentioned later in “Mass

Democracy” and “Mass Nationalism”) the working class was rendered into a “nation”, a

constituent of the capitalist state, through the expansion of suffrage, and formally became a

political sovereign.10 Likewise, Matsushita explained the transformation “from civil society

(shimin shakai) in the nineteenth century to mass society (taishū shakai) in the twentieth

century” through “the socialization of production” and “the proletarianization of a massive

population” in the stage of monopoly capitalism. So, again, he described the stage of

monopoly capitalism, which could be distinguished from the stage of industrial capitalism, as

the “contemporary” rather than the “modern”.

Here we need to examine several terms used in Matsushita’s arguments. First of all,

<taishū (the masses)> with brackets is the key concept. Matsushita wrote that the word

“mass” or “the masses” is a controversial concept and that it can mean people, multitude,

crowd or mob, and he declared that his conception of <taishū (the masses)> (not the masses

without brackets) was different from such expression.11 His <taishū (the masses)> meant the

social form of the working class that became immanent within the monopoly capitalist regime

in the twentieth century. Next are the terms “working class”, “new middle class” and

“proletarianization”. According to him, the “proletarianization” is “the estrangement from

the traditional means of production and the commodification of labor power”.12 Matsushita

added: (A) a new middle class can be included in the working class from the viewpoint of this

“proletarianization”; but, even if (A) is supposed, (B) the working class and the new middle

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class should confront each other from the viewpoint of their different positions in the process

of production.13 He seemed to distinguish logically between the working class and the new

middle class, but, in his explanation of “the proletarianization of massive population at the

stage of monopoly capitalism”, he seemed to include both of them. What he meant by

“proletariat” was those who necessarily make a living by selling their labor power in the

process of socialized production.

Then, how was the realization of mass society accomplished, within which the form

of the working class was rendered <the masses>? Referring to Max Weber’s study of

bureaucracy, Karl Mannheim’s theory of mass society, and Harold J. Laski’s pluralist theory,

Matsushita conceptualized the processes of social change as “organization” and “atomization”:

here, “organization” is the mechanization of the process of production, including the transport

system; and “atomization” is the appearance of a massive group of unskilled workers through

the ruin of the traditional community and proletarianization (or the estrangement from the

traditional means of production).14 According to Matsushita, these two processes became

crucial to the Ford system in the stage of monopoly capitalism, which made possible mass

production, and these processes further developed in four dimensions:15

The process of bureaucratization: The working class that had to sell its labor power for

survival were atomized and reorganized in bureaucratic organization. The stage of

monopoly capitalism spread this process over all social spheres.

The process of grouping: Atomized populations were, according to various interests, organized

in groups. In addition, the development of communication technology brought about

so-called “the age of group” instead of the modern age of individual.

The process of technologization: the widespread of technology throughout society brought

about the formal rationality of society. At the same time, the development of mass

communications ruined the traditional notions of time and space. Individuals, who were

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fragmented and isolated from each other, had to judge daily matters not through their

power, but through the news, as filtered through the press or the radio.

The process of emotionalization: people’s frustrations were enlarged through both the ruin of

the traditional mode of living and the contradictions of capitalism, and these frustrations

were accumulated within society as irrational energy.

Matsushita continued, “the processes of ‘technologization’ and ‘emotionalization’

could be seen more clearly in the recent ‘total war’ in the twentieth century. The state was

completely mechanized as a war-machine, and it exploited a kind of nationalism that

resembled a primitive religion accompanied by ‘sacrifices’”.16 For him, these processes

ruined the notion of civil society that had been based on the notion of the rational individual,

and became the conditions for the formation of <taishū (the masses)>.

Matsushita never intended to suggest that capitalistic class relationships disappeared

in mass society by arguing that “kaikyū” (class) became <taishū (the masses)>. From the

viewpoint of his “proletarianization”, the class relationship was still there. Rather, he argued

that the social form of the working class differed between the stage of industrial capitalism in

the nineteenth century and the stage of monopoly capitalism in the twentieth century:

What my mass society theory poses is the difference of the condition of people’s pacification between

the class society in the nineteenth century and that in the twentieth century, not the class society in general. The issues of mass society theory in Japan today are: why people specifically appear as <the masses> now, and why democracy is mutilated and becomes mass democracy. What are the

contemporary conditions that bring about <the masses>? And what kind of prescriptions should be

made which would enable us to overcome such <massification>?17 The point at issue that I pose through the mass society theory is that the form of the working class’ unawareness in the twentieth century has changed from that in the nineteenth century. Formerly, people were unaware because of their ignorance based on material poverty. Today, they are unaware

while they can enjoy mass consumption.18

He even referred to the relevance of the Marxian view:

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Surely, “the mass society” is not the concept posed by Marxism...However, as far as we recognize mass society as the new actuality, social theory has to correspond to this. And the view of Marx, who could

foresee the fate of modern industry, makes it possible for us to approach mass society theoretically. Marx’s theoretical view allows us a more structural theorizing of mass society that is different from

positivistic description or pathological analysis.19

The last quotation shows that Matsushita regarded Marx as a theorist of industrial society and,

as mentioned above, he stressed the role for the forces of production in the change of the form

of society and the working class. Matsushita’s intention was not the abandonment of Marx,

but rather the application of the Marxian thinking to the situation of mass society. He

asserted that Marxists had to acknowledge the fact that the form of society called “mass

society” existed; that the dimension of the argument was different between mass society theory

(on Form of Society) and Marxism (on Economic Structure), so the opposition of the mass

society theory and Marxism was impossible; and that a possible comparison would be “the

theorizing of mass society from the viewpoint of Marxism and from other standpoints”.20

“Mass Democracy” and “Mass Nationalism”

Now, through what kind of process was the working class made immanent within the

regime? Matsushita’s answer to this question consisted of two points: “mass democracy” and

“mass nationalism”. The meaning of the former is clear enough, but the latter cannot be said

to be a familiar term within social science.

The problem of “mass democracy” is that the working class, which appeared as a

political subject through political levelling (through universal suffrage or labor movements),

became, at the same time, passive under the changed social situations. Matsushita called the

development of technology and mass communication “the second industrial revolution”, and

he made a distinction between industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century and monopoly

capitalism of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the advancement of technology with

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mass production and mass consumption seemed to have relieved the working class from

economic and mental poverty. On the other hand, however, technology made bureaucratic

control and the manipulation of the masses possible. The working class, who should have

become the political subject, was at the same time made into a political object – Matsushita

called such a situation “alienation of mass society”:

Indeed, it is necessary to pay attention to the double dehumanization of capitalistic alienation (through

making labor power commodity) and alienation of mass society (bureaucratic control and the manipulation of the masses). That is, to render the working class to <the masses> does not mean to

overcome the class relationship itself but only to change its existential form.21

Matsushita posed such a double alienation in order to criticize both “the simple

reduction of specifically contemporary alienation of mass society to capitalistic alienation in

general” and “the tendency of losing sight of basic capitalistic alienation by only seeing

current actuality of bureaucratic control and the manipulation of the masses”. 22 Also,

Matsushita refused to regard political apathy or irrationality, which were often discussed in the

pathological analyses of mass society in Europe and America, as substantial attributes that

were peculiar to <the masses>. For him, mass society was brought about through the

manipulation and domestication of the working class by the dominant political regime.

Therefore, to grasp the problems of <the masses> involved criticizing the political regime.23

Matsushita’s explanation of “mass nationalism” was that the proletarianized

<masses> (as he defined it) became political subjects who were constituent of the nation state

with universal suffrage, and at the same time, “national identification” was cultivated among

people by national popular culture brought about through the advance of technology.

National identification penetrated deeply and expanded among the working class through

compulsory education or by national symbols, such as national anthems, flags and so on.24

However, the consequence of “mass democracy” was not the activation but the passivization

of the working class, and in this sense, universal suffrage brought about spontaneous

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self-domestication of the class. Moreover, with the development of the welfare state,

“socialism that had been opposed to the state changed into socialism which could be realized

by the state”.25 Therefore, Matsushita said, the working class was no longer the deprived

segment of humanity without a motherland, but rather it became “<the masses> which were

emancipated by universal suffrage as the political subject within the state, which enjoyed

national popular culture, whose lives were made secure nationally, and which had national

allegiance”.26 Matsushita’s “mass nationalism” meant this change in form of the working

class as a “nation” which had a motherland.

Furthermore, Matsushita said that the political regime of “the state of the masses” by

“mass nationalism” was completed through imperialist war in the stage of monopoly

capitalism. That is, what enabled “total war” to mobilize all material resources and

manpower was the fact that <the masses> had not “class consciousness” but “national

allegiance”. Nationalism, which was used in order to mobilize the masses/people for the

crisis of war, was mass manipulation by the dominant political regime, and it was “the

penetration of the logic of the political regime” into the working class.27 According to

Matsushita, to say that the welfare state was “the motherland” of the working class was an

illusion. For monopoly capital reigned over the welfare state and social democracy, and the

working class did not win political rule, contrary to the pseudo-subjectivity of <the masses>.28

In this stage, socialism split into two factions. Socialism was nationalized by the formation

of social democracy as “the socialism that could be realized by the state, parliamentary and

patriotic socialism”, and therefore “the uniting of working men of all countries” was betrayed

for the defense of their motherland at the First World War.29 Then the Comintern-type of

communism, which rejected social democracy, regarding it as “social patriotism”, appeared.30

This was the mass society theory as developed by Matsushita. He persistently used

the framework of Marx as the theory of industrial society. Matsushita’s conception of double

alienation, “capitalistic alienation” and “alienation of mass society”, shows that he was critical

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of both Western mass society theories that stressed a classless society and dogmatic Marxism

that insisted merely on class conflict. Matsushita’s mass society theory was an attempt at a

comprehensive political and social theory of “contemporary” double alienation.

Socialism as Society-ism: “Lockean Marx”

Matsushita’s mass society theory was based on his study of John Locke in the early

1950s. The intention of his arguments on mass society was not to show how out-of-date

Marxist class theory was, but to make clear why the characteristics of the political and social

theories in the twentieth century (the “contemporary”) differed from those in the nineteenth

century (the “modern”). Now let us look at how Matsushita understood the nature of modern

political theory up through the nineteenth century, which he called “civic political theory”, and

its transformation in the twentieth century. The point to be made clear here is that Matsushita

regarded Marx’s theory and socialist thought as a successor to civic political theory; that is,

Marxism was the civic political theory of industrial society or of the stage of industrial

capitalism.

What Matsushita called “civic political theory” was the dominant theory during the

age of industrial capitalism in England in the nineteenth century; the origin of this theory was

Locke’s political theory in the seventeenth century. Matsushita found that civic political

theory had a particular theoretical structure: its central value was the “liberty” of the

“individual”; and its theoretical frame was “power versus liberty” or “the state versus the

individual”. For Matsushita, to theorize about the relation between power and liberty by

starting from the notion of individual liberty was “theorizing modernity”; and Locke was the

person who established the modern theory in this sense because Locke’s social contract was

the conception of civil (or political) society as a free association of the individual. This civil

society was different from Hobbes’ absolute Leviathan that would be made through transfer of

each individual’s natural right to a sovereign. The Lockean concept of civil society was the

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model of Matsushita’s conception of civil society as an association of free, equal, and

independent individuals.31

And, for Matsushita, Marx also shared the same conception of civil society.

Matsushita argued that, in Britain, civic political theory after Locke developed through the

Scottish Enlightenment and Jeremy Bentham,32 and that the theory then had to deal with the

rise of the working class under the development of industrial capitalism.33 He understood the

rise of socialism as follows:

…[I]t became clear that the “liberty” of the universal “individual” just substantially meant the “liberty”

of the bourgeois “class”. Then, the class-nature of the “individual” was revealed, and the movement of “socialism” attempted to turn the “liberty” that alienated the proletarian “class” into the “liberty” of the

truly universal “individual”.34

Then, Matsushita attempted to situate Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party as

the ultimate completion of socialist thought, and here is a uniqueness of his understanding of

modern Western political theory: he read Marx’s theory as a conception of proletarian civil

society in industrial society against bourgeois civil society. Matsushita asserted that what

was remarkable was the fact that socialist thought “inherited the theoretical frame of the

antinomy of the ‘state’ versus the ‘individual’ from civic political theory”.35 In other word,

Marx set an antinomy between the bourgeois state and the proletarian individual, instead of the

antinomy between the state and the individual.

This point is important, so let us quote from his text:

[In Marx’s theory] the antinomy of absolutist “state” versus civic “individual” in classical civic political theory turned to bourgeois “state” versus the proletarian “individual”, through interpolating the medium

of “class” between the “state” and the “individual”. …Socialist movements in general derived from civic political theory: the notion of the “individual” that is opposed to the “state”, and also the notion of “civil society” as the free association of “individuals”. The Lockean revolutionary problematic of

civic political theory, that is, the “state” versus the “individual” (or civil society), reappeared in socialist

theory.36

17

And he used the term “society-ism” to describe the inheritance of the notion of “civil society”

as a free association of individuals from civic political theory to socialist thought.

…Marx’s image of communist society was “civil society” as the association of “free individuals”, which would be realised through the Aufheben of bourgeois “state” by proletarian “class”.

“In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class conflicts there will be an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. (Manifesto of the Communist Party)

What we can see here is the harmony of “free individuals” in “civil society” as a free

association. “Socialism” was indeed a legitimate successor of “society-ism”.37

Matsushita did not define his concept of “society-ism” clearly, but we can understand

it as the idea of “civil society” or the free association of individuals. For him, utopian

socialist thought, which was the transition from bourgeois civic political theory to socialist

theory, was society-ism rather than socialism. It merely intended to expand quantitatively the

subject of “civil society” from the bourgeoisie to the working class. Marx, on the contrary,

“raised the destruction of bourgeois ‘civil society’ or the bourgeois ‘state’ by the proletarian

‘class’ which was generated from the production of modern industrial capitalism. Socialism

therefore pursued the qualitative transformation of a bourgeois to a proletarian civil society”.38

Here, Matsushita understood Marx as a theorist of “proletarian civil society” in industrial

society. This is the core idea of Matsushita’s political theory that was often called “Lockean

Marx”.

Socialism and Democracy: In Relation to Contemporary European Democratic Ttheory

Matsushita conceived of democracy not as a bourgeois democracy that would be

overcome through the socialist revolution, but as the legacy that mankind had won through

struggles: or, not as “bourgeois” but as “universal” democracy. He also regarded so-called

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formal liberty not as bourgeois liberty but as the series of procedures for securing basic human

rights against political power, quite apart from the differences of regime between capitalism

and socialism.39 He pointed out the three principles of which formal liberty is composed:

I. Legal order, which secures the individuals’ free political sphere from oppression through a series of certain rules, II. The autonomy of the individual in the free political sphere, and III. The right of resistance, on which the individual is able to resist when the free political sphere is violated.

Among these principles, Matsushita emphasized I and III as “freedom from power”, which

should be understood as a sense of tension between the individual and political power.

Without such understanding, “freedom toward power” would easily bring about “pseudo-

democracy” as the domination of people’s will manipulated in mass society. 40 Such

arguments on “power versus liberty” or “power versus the individual” were from Matsushita’s

study of Locke as “civic political theory”. For Matsushita, such individual liberty was the

universal issue both in capitalism and socialism for its formality, so democracy was

“universal” democracy that had to be secured because it was formal.

Matsushita’s conception of the championship of universal democracy was strongly

motivated by the historical fact that the Nazis defeated the German Communist Party, one of

the strongest Communist Parties in Europe. While socialists had once criticized civic liberty

as “formal democracy for the championship of bourgeois private property”, and regarded the

progress from formal democracy to socialism as substantial liberty, the ready-made formal

democracy was destroyed in a flash by the fascism, which emerged from mass society. For

Matsushita, it was the Socialists’ rash criticism of the bourgeois “formal liberty” and “formal

democracy” that opened the way toward fascism in Germany.41 Pre-war fascism explicitly

oppressed people’s liberty. On the contrary, in the post-war era, there was another possibility

of a type of fascism in which individual liberty would become substantially impotent through

mass democracy (bureaucratic control and manipulation of the masses) in the name of a free

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society. Considering this possibility, Matsushita insisted that it must be the task of

communism to succeed and sustain the “bourgeois legacy” of democracy from the former

philosophy of Enlightenment and from the French Revolution in mass society.42

Therefore, in the present age of mass society, “the idea of resistance can be realistic

politically only when it is connected not to the socialist revolution directly but to the defense

of liberty and democracy”.43 “When revolutionary movements, whose core is the working

class, confront a fascist counter-revolution, the former should develop as a common front

sustained by the thought of resistance in order to champion the liberty and democracy of all the

people”.44 Matsushita asserted that revaluation of formal liberty and the right of resistance

should be the basis for the realization of a common front beyond both social democracy and

the Comintern-type of communism: the former lost the logic of revolution through its willing

acceptance of liberty in the capitalist regime; and the latter, on the contrary, rejected

parliamentary democracy at all as a “bourgeois illusion”.45

Such Japanese arguments about democracy and socialism would immediately remind

us of the idea of liberal socialism by Norberto Bobbio. Although Bobbio pointed out four

paradoxes that prevent the achievement of democracy in contemporary western societies – the

large scale of modern social life, the increasing bureaucratization of the state apparatus, the

growing technicality of the decisions it is necessary to make, and the trend of civil society

towards becoming a mass society –, he insists that contemporary democracy is at least much

better than fascist or state socialist dictatorship.46 For Bobbio, a minimal definition of

democracy is “a set of rules (primary or basic) which establish who is authorized to take

collective decision and which procedures are to be applied”,47 and the only possible socialist

politics is a politics that protects democratic institutions, rather than rejecting it as “bourgeois”

or “formal” democracy. Here, we will examine John Keane’s theory of socialism and

democracy that takes over from Bobbio’s view and further elaborates its idea of civil society,

which should be compared with Matsushita’s conception.

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Keane also requires socialists to abandon the traditional leftist idea that socialism will

be realized by rejection of liberal democracy, saying that “A post-liberal democracy is

thinkable and desirable, but a non-liberal democracy is a contradiction in terms and in fact”.48

In the 1980s, he conceived the withering away of civil society on both Eastern and Western

Europe: under the one-party systems in central and eastern Europe, civil society in the sense of

public sphere from below, independent from the state and the Party, was about to extinct, and

the difference between political and social lives were eliminated; in Western democracies,

although distinction between the state and civil society remained, civil society was constantly

threatened by the activities of states and private corporations that display a remarkable

capacity to extend their reach.49 In such a context, Keane insisted it is necessary for socialists

to radically redefine socialism not to be identified with centralized state power. Socialism

must become synonymous with greater democracy, for the vitalization of civil society and the

democratic reform of state power.

Keane advocates the radical redefinition of socialism as the democratisation of both

civil society and the state, or as the democratisation of social political power: socialism in this

sense would mean democratic reform of state power against the failures of state-administered

socialism, and vitalisation of civil society against authoritarian neo-conservatism. 50 He

continues that, although traditional socialists still continue to view democracy in purely

instrumental terms and define socialism narrowly in terms of economic equality and state

control of civil society, “The development of new democratic mechanisms within and between

the state and civil society does not guarantee approval for traditional socialist ideas,

particularly those centred on the collective ownership and state control of the means of

production”.51 So, if socialism must be equivalent to the separation and democratisation of

civil society and the state, socialists have to abandon the habit of postulating such dualisms as

centralism/decentralism, state planning/private markets, statutory/voluntary, professional/lay

and public property/private property: “the traditional twentieth-century choice between statist

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models of socialism (such as social democracy and communist revolution to strengthen the

state in the name of abolishing it) and syndicalism and other forms of ‘libertarianism’ is now

exhausted”.52

Comparison of Matsushita’s and Keane’s Arguments

Matsushita’s mass society theory and political theory have several affinities with

Keane’s arguments about civil society and the state. First of all, Matsushita’s idea of

“universal democracy” against Japanese Marxists’ rejection of democracy as “bourgeois

democracy” has the same orientation of Keane’s socialism as “greater democracy” (as well as

Bobbio’s understanding of liberal democracy). Democracy must neither be treated as an

instrument of the achievement of socialism nor be regarded as bourgeois’ to be abolished, but,

rather, socialism must become a promoter of the radicalization of democracy. It can be said

that Matsushita understood socialism as a radical democratic theory when he said that Marx

succeeded the basic idea of civil society since Locke and that Marxism was “society-ism” that

conceived proletarian civil society against bourgeois civil society. For Matsushita, formal

democracy had to be premised rather than abolished, but, at the same time, in spite of the

realization of universal suffrage, workers were not sovereign substantially because of

capitalistic class relationship (the capitalistic alienation) and formal democracy would easily

fall into mass democracy by the bureaucratic control (or the alienation of mass society).

Therefore, what was to be insisted on was people’s “opposition” to state power, “participation”

in the decision-making process, and “self-government” or autonomy. In this sense,

Matsushita’s intention was to make formal democracy substantial, or to radicalize democracy.

Matsushita’s conception of “society-ism” for overcoming double alienation seems to

correspond to Keane’s idea of redefined socialism as the double democratization of civil

society and the state, although Matsushita did not share the context of the 1980s Europe, that is

the confrontation between social democracy and neo-conservatism over “the state or civil

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(market) society”.53 How to overcome capitalistic alienation leads to how to democratize

market society and how to counter the neo-conservative ideology of free market and corporate

capitalism; while how to overcome the alienation of mass society connects with how to vitalize

and democratize civil society as long as the problem of bureaucratic control and manipulation

of the masses, both of which prevents people from realizing self-determination, are still actual

by centralized state power and the large media.

This does not mean that Keane’s conception of civil society is the same as

Matsushita’s. What Keane keeps in mind is the one-party system of actually existed

socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, in which civil society as an autonomous sphere from

the state was about to be abolished, on the one hand, and the deadlock of the Keynesian

welfare state in Western Europe, on the other. Against the rise of neo-conservatism in the

1980s, Keane conceived that civil society and the state must become the condition of each

other’s democratization, and stressed the role of grass-root, informal, and apolitical “new

social movements”. 54 At the same time, he has been skeptical of the possibility of

participatory or direct democracy. With Bobbio, he basically understands democracy as a

system of procedural rules: “direct democracy thrives upon consensual decision-making…and

it therefore works best when there are a limited number of alternative policy choices,” and,

without institutions of delegated or representative democracy, decision-making over multiple

and conflicting issues can be arbitral.55

It can be said that Keane’s civil society argument puts stress upon pluralism rather

than people’s political participation:

The secret of liberty, whose maximization requires the maximization of complex equality among

citizens, is the division of decision-making powers into a variety of institutions within and between civil society and the state. The maximization of citizens’ liberty entails the enlargement of their choices – particularly among those presently worse off. Choice enlargement requires, in turn, an increase in the

variety of social and political spheres in which different groups of citizens could participate, if and when

they so wished.56

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Keane adds as well that the stipulation that citizens could participate within particular spheres

of civil society and the state if they so wished is important. Democracy does not require all

individuals to play the role of full-time political animals57: “Too much democracy can kill off

democracy. The wholesale politicization of life, the attempt to create a society of full-time,

omnicompetent citizens, is in fact antithetical to democracy”.58 Keane seems to be afraid of

results of this, that is, as in Central and Eastern Europe where the distinction between civil

society and the state, and between social and political spheres, had been disappeared,

everything would be defined as political, private life would be swallowed up by the public

sphere, human beings would be transformed into “total citizens”, all of which deny the

diversity and complexity of modern societies59

Matsushita’s conception of civil society, on the other hand, seems parallel to

participatory democracy. He distilled the idea of voluntary association of free individuals

from Locke’s political theory and found in Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party the

conception of radical democracy in order to realize civil society as a free association of

proletarian individuals (his Lockean understanding of Marx). In the context of Japan – where

in the pre-war era civil liberty and the private sphere had been dominated by state power and

the Japanese people had been transformed into a “total nation” who had been loyal to the

Emperor’s state and would wage nationalistic total war – Matsushita surely had the same fear

as Keane that the political would ruin the social, and Matsushita regarded the individual’s

liberty from state power as highly significant in post-war Japan. Nevertheless, the post-war

Japanese democracy he faced in the 1950s was mass democracy through “privatization”

through the transformation from “messhi hōkō” to “mekkō hōshi”, with centralized

bureaucratic state power remaining since the end of the nineteenth century, as well as Japanese

people’s deep-rooted pre-modern, feudalistic mentality even after the war.

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Conclusion

During and after the 1980s, Matsushita’s mass society theory has tended to be treated

as a product of the leftist atmosphere of Japan in the 1950s. The word “taishū shakai” has

remained but been vulgarized, and Japanese political theorists and sociologists’ comprehensive

discussions about mass society and mass democracy have been rare since the last decade.

After the 1989 revolution in Central and Eastern Europe, Japanese social scientists

have vigorously been reconsidering democracy and civil society, but there have been no

significant discussions about mass society. And, around 1995, the fiftieth anniversary after

the Japanese defeat in the war, reflections on post-war Japanese political studies have

blossomed. Nevertheless, a thoroughgoing revaluation of Matsushita’s political theory and

mass society theory does not seem to have begun. It can be said that, in current Japanese

critical circles, there is a contradictory atmosphere: on the one hand, that “now is no longer

conformist mass society but pluralist post-modern society, therefore post-war Japanese theories

and discussions of mass society are already old-fashioned”, and, on the other hand, that “mass

society and mass democracy are plain facts about which there is no need to discuss”. In such

a confusing atmosphere, Japanese intellectuals hardly consider what “mass society” means.

I suppose that current Japanese arguments about democracy and civil society include

two aspects: one is concern over people’s privatization and loss of public sphere (res publica),

and at the restoration of social integration – in the form of association or civil society –,

overcoming extreme individualism. The other is concern over conformism and the

radicalization of pluralism. It is important to mention here that both points – people’s

privatization and conformism – were in classical mass society arguments. Nevertheless, in

Japan since the 1990s, these two aspects are separately studied under the influence of so-called

post-modern contemporary philosophy, ignoring mass society theories, and seem not to be

comprehensively grasped. Therefore, it is highly difficult for Japanese political theorists to

have a total image of the history of democratic theory in the twentieth century.

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It must be true that Matsushita’s theory is highly unique as mass society theory and is a

legacy of post-war Japanese political studies to be reread and revaluated when Japanese political

students consider about further democratization of Japan. Matsushita’s theory is also a legacy of

twentieth-century democratic theory to be reconsidered when we argue about the relation between

socialism and democracy, between mass society and civil society, and between mass democracy

and radical democracy.60

1 See for example H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951); E. Lederer, State of the Masses: The Threat of the Classless Society (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Publishers, 1940); S. Neumann, Permanent Revolution: The Total State in a World at War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942). Cf. W. Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959). 2 The word is also an adjective that modifies other words with such implications. For example, “taishū shokudō” is a cheap, not so high quality restaurant that offers common menus. “Taishū” as an adjective also means “popular”: “taishū bunka” is popular culture that not only the rich but also common people can enjoy. The expression is also used when highbrow culture becomes low and vulgarized. 3 Cf. H. Abe, Gendai Seiji to Seijigaku [Contemporary Politics and Political Study] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1989). 4 J. Saitō, “Hihanteki Kōkyōsei no Kanōsei wo Megutte: Shinmitsuken no Potensharu [On the Possibility of Critical Publicness: The Potential for an Intimate Sphere]”, in N. Ono et al., Modān to Post-modān: Seiji Shisō-shi no Saihakken [Modern and Post-modern: Rediscovery in the History of Political Thought] (Tokyo: Bokutakusha, 1992). 5 K. Matsushita, Gendai Seiji no Jōken [Conditions of Contemporary Politics], expanded edition (Tokyo: Chūō-Kōron Sha, 1969), p. 232. This book was originally published in 1959, and collected his most essays about mass society which were written during the period of the “Debate on Mass Society” in Japan between 1956 and 1958. 6 Ibid., p. 233. 7 Ibid., p. 11. 8 Ibid., p. 287. 9 Ibid., pp. 98-9. 10 Ibid., pp. 18-19, 20-22; K. Matsushita, Shimin Seiji Riron no Keisei [The Foundation of Civic Political Theory] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1959), pp. 420-1. 11 K. Matsushita, Gendai Seiji no Jōken [Conditions of Contemporary Politics], pp. 9-10. 12 Ibid., p. 10. 13 Ibid., p. 12. 14 Ibid., pp. 13-4.

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15 Ibid., pp. 14-5. 16 Ibid., p. 15. 17 Ibid., p. 236. 18 Ibid., p. 238. 19 Ibid., p. 56. 20 Ibid., p. 235. 21 Ibid., p. 57. 22 Ibid., p. 297. 23 Ibid., p. 29. 24 Ibid., p. 86. 25 Ibid., p. 22. 26 Ibid., p. 87. 27 Ibid., p. 23. 28 Ibid., pp. 22-4. 29 Ibid., pp. 87-8. 30 Ibid., p. 85. 31 K. Matsushita, “Shūdan Kannen no Keisei to Shimin Seiji Riron no Kōzō Tenkan (1) [The Formulation of the Idea of Group and the Structural Transformation of Civic Political Theory: Part 1]”, Hōgaku Shirin [Review of Law and Political Sciences], Vol. 53, No. 3/4 (1956), Hōsei University, pp. 160-62. 32 Matsushita, Shimin Seiji Riron no Keisei [The Foundation of Civic Political Theory], chapter 5. 33 Ibid., p. 417. 34 Ibid., p. 418. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., pp. 418-9. 38 Ibid., p. 419. 39 Matsushita, Gendai Seiji no Jōken [Conditions of Contemporary Politics], p. 177. 40 Ibid., pp. 182-3. 41 Ibid., p. 177. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., p. 192. 44 Ibid., p. 193. 45 Ibid., p. 195. 46 N. Bobbio, Which Socialism?: Marxism, Socialism and Democracy, Translated by R. Griffin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 99. Cf. A. M. Gamble, “Socialism, Radical Democracy, and Class Politics”, in D. McLellan and S. Sayers eds., Socialism and Democracy (London: Macmillan, 1991). 47 N. Bobbio, The Future of Democracy: A Defence of the Rules of the Game, Translated by R. Griffin (Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 1987), p. 24. 48 J. Keane, “Democracy and the Idea of the Left”, in McLellan and Sayers eds., op. cit., p. 9. 49 J. Keane, “Introduction”, in J. Keane ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 2-6. 50 J. Keane, Democracy and Civil Society: On the Predicaments of European Socialism, the Prospects for Democracy, and the Problem of Controlling Social and Political Power (London: Verso, 1988), p. 25. 51 Ibid., pp. 25-6.

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52 Ibid., p. 26. 53 Cf. D. Held, Political Theory and the Modern State: Essays on State, Power and Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). 54 Keane, “Introduction”, in Keane ed., op. cit., pp. 1-13. 55 Keane, “Democracy and the Idea of the Left”, in McLellan and Sayers eds., op. cit., p. 8-10. 56 Keane, Democracy and Civil Society, p. 13. 57 Ibid. 58 Keane, “Democracy and the Idea of the Left”, in McLellan and Sayers eds., op. cit., p. 11. 59 Ibid. 60 In my book Democracy and Mass Society: A Japanese Debate (Tokyo: Gakujutsu Shuppankai, 2006, ISBN: 4-8205-2100-4), I attempted to fully examine Matsushita’s political theory which has been elaborated since the 1950s.