The Kyoto School, the Cambridge School, and the History of Political Philosophy in Wartime Japan

The Kyoto School, the Cambridge School, and the History

of Political Philosophy in Wartime Japan

Chris Goto-Jones

The history of political philosophy is a singularly self-defensive subfield. It is perhaps even more defensive than the history of philosophy as a whole, within which it occupies an important and central location. As in the wider field, one of the central dilemmas for the history of political philosophy concerns the significance and meaning of context. However, in the case of political thought in particular, the stakes in this debate are rather more politicized, as one might expect.

Since the end of World War II, and particularly since the 1960s and the appearance of the so-called New Historians in Cambridge, a major disci-plinary debate has concerned the relative importance of textual meaning and historical context in the history of ideas.1 Recent influential accounts of the state of the discipline have suggested that this pivotal debate “seems to have run out of steam over the last decade” because “the case against

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contextual readings in the history of political thought is increasingly hard to make.”2 However, even if we are to accept that the Cambridge School has effectively won this debate, it is far from clear that the field has really come to grips with the political implications of its own conclusions. In particular, the acceptable parameters of context have remained strictly delimited by the whispered yet pervasive identity politics of the field itself. Despite its osten-sibly inclusive tone, context has unfortunately become a buzzword for intel-lectual conservatism and ethnocentricity in the history of political thought. To borrow a phrase from the historian Suzuki Shigetaka, context appears to have become a strategic defense against a European “sense of crisis” con-cerning Europe’s place in the world.

Historians of political thought in non-Euro-American contexts find themselves in a contradictory relationship with this mainstream debate. Prima facie, the ascendancy of context should provide a discursive space for the non-Western in the history of philosophy. However, it is not at all clear that this is the kind of site that context has served to open up; historical con-text does not appear to overlap with spatiocultural context. The geohistorical standpoint called for by Nishitani Keiji in 1941 has not materialized. The main problem appears to be the persistent (and occasionally even explicit) assumption that “the history of ideas can teach us something about our own intellectual, philosophical, moral or political predicament,” where we are defined almost exclusively as “dead, white and male.”3 Despite some success-ful efforts to broaden these contextual parameters, particularly to include dead, white females,4 it remains the case that of all the possible historical contexts that might be of interest to historians of political philosophy, none of them appear to be found outside the geohistorical spaces of Europe and the United States. It is for this reason (among others) that the Kyoto School of philosophy presents a special challenge to historians of political thought. Interestingly, the question of inclusivity was also one of the central problem-atics that defined the Kyoto School’s philosophy of history.

The political philosophy of the wartime Kyoto School has, in fact, been victim of a double marginalization. In the first place, it has been excluded from mainstream histories of political thought because of this defensive ethnocentricity in the discipline, despite the ostensible victory of context in recent years. Second, it has also been demonized even within the allied


Goto-Jones | History of Political Philosophy in Wartime Japan 15

(albeit rather more niche) discipline of Japanese intellectual history because of its association with (or context in) the war itself, which appears to imply that the school is somehow anti-Western rather than a possible strand in an aspirant universalist history of political philosophy.5 In fact, these two mar-ginalizations are aspects of the same methodological problem — the selec-tive and inconsistent application of the insights of the Cambridge School to non-European contexts.

In this article I hope to explore some of the strategies that have been employed (deliberately or inadvertently) in the history of political thought to marginalize or even exclude the non-European. It will be seen that a number of these strategies were already identified and critiqued by the wartime Kyoto School, particularly in their political writings of the early 1940s. Hence this article represents a first attempt at a resurrection of the Kyoto School’s philosophy of history as applied to the history of political thought in particular. One of the most striking conclusions is that the defeat of Japan in 1945 and the subsequent discrediting of Kyoto School philosophy has enabled historians of political thought to persist in their conservatism, rendering the discipline almost static in regard to its perspective on the non-European in the second half of the twentieth century. The various defenses of the Cambridge School against charges of antiquarianism and conserva-tism even within the European tradition have actually served to bolster the Eurocentricity of the discipline. Because of this, the Kyoto School’s critique of Europe’s sense of crisis remains as relevant and potent today as it was during the wartime period.

Somewhat ironically, attempts to discredit the philosophy of the wartime Kyoto School through appeals to its wartime context (i.e., to its allegedly aggressive anti-Westernism during a war “against the West”) have recently been undermined in the discipline of the history of political thought by its own attempts to rejuvenate itself through recourse to early-twentieth-century figures of dubious political orientation in Europe, especially Nazis. If, for example, Carl Schmitt can find a place in the mainstream narrative, it would be ridiculous to exclude the Kyoto School on the grounds of its (much more contested) association with Japanese imperialism. If it is excluded, the logic of this exclusion must tend toward parochialism or ethnocentricity. In fact, it is precisely the Kyoto School’s opposition to the dominance of Euro-



pean historical method that makes such a valuable addition to the history of political thought.

The Highways and Byways of “Our Own” Predicaments

One of the most durable and long-lasting critiques of the Cambridge School’s emphasis on understanding historical context as the key to under-standing the meaning of a philosophical text has been that such a method encourages a self-referential and inward-looking discipline. To phrase the rejoinder in slightly different terms: rather than being concerned with the wisdom of past thinkers about timeless questions of morality and politics, the emphasis on context risks transforming the subject of the discipline into the past itself, thus making it less relevant (or perhaps even irrelevant) to the moral and political predicaments of the present.

The effect of this powerful (and rather political) criticism on the field has been substantial. However, in some ways, it is the responses to this criticism that have caused the problems of ethnocentricity that concern me here; by rallying to the defense of the relevance of contextual readings, a number of high-profile thinkers have adopted strategies that effectively (and perhaps inadvertently) reduce extra-European pasts into irrelevance. In most cases this appears to be an accidental consequence of their arguments, but this in itself is indicative of the lack of regard afforded the non-European in the mainstream.

David Runciman provides an interesting example of the defensive strategy in question. He concedes, quite reasonably, that the charge of antiquarian-ism is not wholly without teeth. Quite rightly, he does not concede that such a criticism is a necessary consequence of the method per se, but he suggests that certain tendencies in the literature of the history of political thought since the 1960s have actually encouraged this particular criticism. Plotting the growth of the field, and arguing sensibly that such rapid and healthy growth would naturally lead to the development of increasingly specialized scholarship, Runciman goes on to observe that some of this very specialized work even addresses “authors from outside the familiar canon of western ideas.” While he is happy to admit that some of this work is “extremely thorough,” he is also careful to note that much of it is also “quite obscure.”



He explains that “to outsiders, and to many insiders, it can sometimes seem rather inward-looking, following . . . through the byways rather than the highways of intellectual history.”6

While I am reasonably sure that this was not his intention, a clear impli-cation of Runciman’s depiction of the field is that the history of non-Western political thought is, if it is anything at all, no more than a byway — it is certainly not part of any of the major highways of the discipline. In fact, he implies that devoting time and energy to these byways is giving the disci-pline a bad name; it gives the critics of contextualist readings space to charge the Cambridge School’s approach to the history of political thought with irrelevance. Nonetheless, Runciman generously suggests that “any flourish-ing field of professional historical inquiry should expect to produce a consid-erable amount of specialist research, and to find room for those practitioners who are uninterested in, or at least untroubled by, questions of contempo-rary relevance.”7 Clearly this is not good enough.

The real issue for historians of non-European political thought, then, concerns the parameters and location of these mysterious disciplinary “high-ways.” Thankfully, Runciman is quite clear about where these highways might be:

The dominant arguments in the history of political thought are currently those which seek to emphasise the ways in which past texts in the history of ideas can teach us something about our own intellectual, philosophical, moral or political predicament. It remains true that most current read-ings in the history of political thought take it for granted that there is no necessary correlation between the concerns of past political thinkers and the anxieties of the present — their problems, by definition, are not our problems. But it does not have to follow from this that our problems might not be recognisable in theirs.8

At first glance, this categorization of the disciplinary highway seems promisingly inclusive. It appears to concede that “the past is a foreign coun-try, they do things differently there,”9 and that consequently non-European pasts might be only as alien as past contexts within Europe’s own historical narratives.10 That is to say, if we can concede that political thinkers from the European past may have relevance to our present, we must logically concede



that the same might be true of figures from non-European pasts: all these pasts are equally foreign countries. Indeed, Runciman’s solution to the prob-lem of the disputed relevance of even European pasts to Euro-American presents appears to open the door still more widely for the non-European: he suggests that we no longer have to find carbon copies of our own predica-ments in the work of past thinkers for them to be relevant; instead we must merely be able to find our problems recognizable in theirs. This recognition seems to be the central criterion for travelers along the main disciplinary highways.

If Runciman’s characterization of the highways is accurate, it should rep-resent a great step away from ethnocentricity. After all, it would be incred-ible for anyone to argue seriously that texts from non-European historical contexts are so alien to the mainstream discipline that it cannot even find anything recognizable in the intellectual, philosophical, moral, or political predicaments discussed therein. Indeed, the discipline’s own aspirations toward universalism would be contradicted by this sort of parochialism: the assumption that historians of political thought currently working in non-European contexts should be interested in the “history of political thought” (in Europe) rests fundamentally on the notion that thinkers do not have to be European to recognize something of their own politico-moral pre-dicaments in the central canon of European political thought. Japan’s Kyoto School, for example, clearly recognized a number of modern Japan’s pre-dicaments in the work of (among many others) Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger. It is ethnocentric to be blind to the logical (if not the historical) necessity of the reverse process.

As we will see later, for the Kyoto School such ethnocentricity is also ahistorical in several important ways, most significantly because it denies the historical character of the twentieth century, which the Kyoto School catego-rized as “worldly” (sekaiteki), at least in Europe and East Asia. �or the war- at least in Europe and East Asia. �or the war-at least in Europe and East Asia. �or the war-time Kyoto School, the fact that they (as Japanese philosophers) were willing to accept the emergence of a historical period in which European thought was relevant (and accessible) to them, while European thinkers remained blind to the relevance of Japanese thought, demonstrated that Europe was conscious of a crisis in the present and that Japan had progressed beyond the confines of nationalist historical narratives. The historical worldliness



of the twentieth century was apparently perceived differently in Japan and Europe. As we will see, the various gymnastics required to sustain Europe’s central position in the discipline in the postwar period do indeed suggest the anxieties of an identity crisis.

How “We” Recognize Ourselves and “Our” Predicaments

A number of leading thinkers of the history of political thought have been very clear that they are not interested in non-European contexts. The point of contention effectively revolves around the meaning of the term recogniz-able. �or some, such as Alisdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, recogniz-able appears to be informed historically rather than philosophically. That is to say, it is not enough to identify a similar political predicament (say, the problem of popular representation) in just any past; rather, the phrasing of that predicament must form part of the narrative history of “our own” phrasing of it now. In Taylor’s words, “We need to give an account of the origins of our present thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, actions.”11 MacIntyre also emphasizes the importance of a historical and genealogical thread link-ing recognizable predicaments together through history. He argues that it is only within the framework of an overarching national narrative or welt-anschauung that we can recognize how past positions competed with each other (in the formation of the present) rather than simply existed as discon-nected alternatives in different contexts.12 In other words, there is an impor-tant sense in which the history of political thought as expounded by Taylor and MacIntyre is deliberately, self-consciously, and even necessarily a history of European political thought. It is concerned with explaining the origins of modern Euro-American thought on politics, and this is the basis of its claim to being a branch of the discipline of history. To this extent, the discipline of the history of political thought is largely concerned with tracing historical continuities — and it is congruence with these highways of continuity that define how recognizable a past position or predicament might be.

The position of Taylor and MacIntyre on this question is clear and well articulated: it is a statement of the history of political thought as the history of European political thought as part of the grand narrative of European history. This is a legitimate and interesting enterprise in itself, of course. However, it



is not the same enterprise as the one tantalizingly hinted at in Runciman’s characterization of the discipline, which does not restrict itself to this kind of particularism. Indeed, contrary to Runciman’s concerns about the detrimen-tal effects on the discipline of studying the non-European byways, which he claims might lead to charges of antiquarianism (i.e., to charges that it is the past rather than the ideas that becomes the subject of study), it seems here that a stronger case could be made that it is the focus of the discipline on Euro-pean history that renders it antiquarian (and even anachronistic) — the high-ways, not the byways, appear to be the problem. The insistence on Europe’s centrality looks increasingly like a conservative reaction to the emergence of a world in which Europe is no longer the center.13

An additional problem for the history of political thought is that the pur-suit of a recognizably European history of thought is not the same enterprise implied by the titles of the works produced by Taylor and MacIntyre, nor by the title of the seminal work by one of the Cambridge School’s lead-ing lights, Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought.14 The aspiration here is clearly universal — there is no European in sight. Hence there appears to be a tension in the field of the history of political philosophy between the particularist and narrative tendencies of history on the one hand and philosophy’s aspirations toward universalism on the other. To the extent that thinkers such as Taylor, MacIntyre, and Skinner conflate the particular and the universal in their presentation of the discipline, they not only risk charges of antiquarianism but also risk perpetrating a kind of imperialism; antiquarianism here slips into ethnocentricity. It would be unimaginable (at least in today’s geohistorical context) if, say, Tetsuo Naji-ta’s important book, Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics, were reprinted as The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Politics.15 Of course, Najita is not nearly so ambitious about the achievements of his work.

It is fascinating to reflect that the parameters of this situation were pre-empted rather crisply by the wartime Kyoto School. In the now infamous Chkron debates of November 16, 1941,16 four members of the school dis-cussed the “study of world history and the philosophy of world history.” In an extract in which all four participants speak, their feelings on the state of the discipline are made very clear:



Nishitani: . . . I think that, in general, Europeans have still not shaken the habit of looking at world affairs from a European perspective . . .

Kosaka: It’s because they think of everything from the standpoint of European expansion!

Kyama: That’s the European crisis!

Suzuki: Rather than having a world-historical consciousness (sekaishi ishiki) in accord with its true meaning, isn’t it the case that Europeans are conscious of a sense of crisis (kiki kannen) when they consider the new world situation (sekai jitai)?17

The wartime Kyoto School was acutely conscious of the imperialist contra-dictions of the universalist aspirations of a particularly European history of philosophy. (They were not always so aware of similar contradictions in their own thought.)

Problems of the Method and Philosophy of Worldly History

In defense of the ethnocentric presentation of the history of political phi-losophy, it remains true that it is merely reflecting the ethnocentricity of the disciplines of both philosophy and political philosophy, neither of which has successfully or substantially opened their doors to the non-Western. In other words, the blindness to non-European thinkers in the history of political thought is a genuine historical phenomenon in the discipline. It is simply true that non-Western thinkers are largely absent from the conventional canon of political philosophy. History is merely reproducing the parochial-ism of its subject matter — if it did anything else, it would risk ceasing to be history at all, apparently. It is for reasons such as this that Suzuki Shigetaka thought that “to truly grasp this problem, the old [discipline of] Western history (seiyshigaku) is of no practical use; it is not a question of knowledge but of standpoint.”18 Kyama Iwao concurs: “I wonder whether the posi-tive method of history that has been used up until now can really enable a discipline of ‘world history’ (sekaishigaku)? And also, I wonder whether a philosophy of world history (sekaishi no tetsugaku) could arise from the kind of meanings of philosophy common up until today?”19



What it means to be engaged in the history of philosophy is a complicated and difficult question, and the discipline has always existed in an uncom-fortable and ambiguous space on the cusp of both (and neither) history and philosophy. On the one hand, it has been seen as committed to document-ing the history of the (historically European) discipline of philosophy (i.e., it is part of the narrative of European identity). On the other hand, it has been seen as instrumental in the process of innovation in the discipline of philosophy as it uncovers and reveals lost or alternative articulations of cur-rent problems in the past, rejuvenating them as resources in the present. It is this second identity that provides hope of escape from parochialism, since the first merely documents it. This second enterprise is responsive, destruc-tive, creative, and of course political. It involves creating “new” histories for political philosophy by searching back through time and space and selecting different texts to form a canon more suitable to the present — a canon in which today’s world can recognize its own predicaments. Of course, “today’s world” is a continuously dynamic, historical entity, and consequently the content of its own predicaments shifts all the time — we might (optimis-tically) presume that these predicaments would no longer be exclusively European in the twenty-first century. In this way, the history of political philosophy exists as the guardian of the continuing relevance of political philosophy itself. In some ways, it reverses the traditional disciplinary hier-archy and renders philosophy into a subfield of the history of philosophy. The history of philosophy retains the power to set agendas for research, hence it becomes an ethical nonsense to argue that historians of political thought have no choice but to reflect the parochialism of philosophy itself. They have a responsibility to explode it.

Interestingly, as we have seen, the need for a new type of history of phi-losophy along these lines was readily apparent to the thinkers of the wartime Kyoto School. In his most notorious essay, “Sekai shin chitsujo no genri” (“Principles of a New World Order”), Nishida Kitar (1870 – 1945) himself argued that the mid-twentieth century should be considered a “period of world self-consciousness” (sekaiteki jikaku) in which there should (with moral force) be an awareness of a world-historical world (sekaishiteki sekai).20 He places this in juxtaposition with the nineteenth century (which he suggested was a period of national self-consciousness [kokkateki jikaku] characterized



by imperialism) and the eighteenth century (which he called a period of individual self-consciousness [kojinteki jikaku] characterized by individu-alism and liberalism). Nishida’s protégé Nishitani Keiji would phrase the periodization slightly differently, in terms of the shift from a Mediterranean period to an Atlantic period and into an emerging Pacific period.21 Nishitani suggests that the Pacific period should witness the development of a “self-consciousness of worldhood” (sekaisei no jikaku).22 The implication in both of these typologies is that attempts to maintain Eurocentricity in the history of philosophy befits the nineteenth century, making it an (immoral) anach-ronism by the early 1940s. It is a type of national self-consciousness — it is an imperialism.

Just like members of the second generation of the Kyoto School, who argued that “what we call true world history began with the twentieth cen-tury; this means that the world outside Europe also became part of the twen-tieth century,”23 Nishida explains why this is the case through recourse to material and technological change: modernity has effectively made the world smaller and brought East Asia into dialogue with Europe. He describes the emerging world order as an “intimate, single world-space” (kinmitsu naru hitotsu no sekaiteki kkan).24 Along similar lines, but appealing to his own geographical sense of historical periodization, Nishitani argues that the his-torical world is actually a geohistorical (rekishi chiriteki) world.25

Nishida is not claiming that East Asia had no history of its own before the twentieth century; he is asserting that this history could only become worldly in the twentieth century. This is also true of European history, although the wartime Kyoto School thinkers are clear that Europe is deliberately holding itself in the past because of the sense of crisis that this transition engen-ders (to a geohistorical particularity with a universalist self-concept).26 In Nishitani’s words, Europe is attempting to ignore the “meteorological sign” (kishgakuteki chk) of a “vital discontinuity in the depths of history.”27

One of the crucial questions regarding this “worldly” approach to the his-tory of philosophy and political thought is how this new method of history will arise. Nishida and Nishitani are rather vague on this issue, and they seem rather naive about the likelihood that European historians of politi-cal thought will surrender the imperialisms of their discipline (including exclusive control over the canon and the notion of recognition) just because



history itself seems to indicate that they have a moral obligation to do so. Nishida’s eminent junior colleague Tanabe Hajime (1885 – 1962) comes clos-est to theorizing the emergence of world history.

Like Nishitani, who was clear that the history of ideas and politics were becoming “world-political [sekai seijiteki] in the true meaning,”28 Tanabe is unambiguous about the political nature of the history of philosophy. In an important series of lectures in 1939, Tanabe explains that we must accept the political nature of history and consequently concede that “history must have the meaning of construction [kensetsu].”29 We make history in the pres-ent.30

Hence Tanabe objects to the presentation of history as development (hat-ten) or as a simple linear narrative of a developing identity. Construction, he says, “can never be thought of as a linear, one-dimensional continuity” (THZ 8:161). Instead, he argues that under certain conditions a historical period will become unable to maintain its integrity or unity, at which point a “structure of discontinuity” (hi-renzokuteki na kz) will arise. This struc-ture functions to replace the old unity with a new one, not by rejecting it but by encompassing it. Rather than being a linear development, then, history might better be described as a series of increasingly wide concentric circles, gradually and seamlessly expanding into a worldly envelope. In this way, we should consider history as a “unity of continuity and discontinuity,” as a flow of “discontinuously unified” and self-sufficient historical periods (161 – 62). The worldly twentieth century should absorb, build on, and transform the nineteenth.

Accordingly, “the present is always placed at the centre of history,” which means that the meaning and significance of the past changes continuously as the future is drawn into the present — “as a new age arrives, the meaning of the past changes with it” (162). Like Nishida and Nishitani, Tanabe is careful not to claim that previous presents are simply discarded or overwrit-ten by the current present; instead he argues that the construction of the present involves a return to and a reinvigoration of the old pasts, transform-ing them into the pasts of a new present. In the absence of this process of incorporation, history would cease to exist; it is the unity of continuity and discontinuity, not simply discontinuity.

When it comes to the present of wartime Japan, Tanabe argues that it



is still meaningful to talk of dividing history into ancient, medieval, and modern periods, following the European convention. However, Tanabe’s construction of this periodization is far from conventional. He is quick to divorce the periods from the “arbitrary facts” (gzenteki na jijitsu) conven-tionally employed to demarcate them.31 Instead, he renders these periods elastically: “The classification of historical periods is not fixed once and for all. If a new age begins, so there will be a new periodization [ jidai kubun], and the writing of history must be re-examined.”32 But Tanabe is not merely objecting to the utilization of particular factual events in Europe to demar-cate historical periods; he is objecting to the use of factual events at all.33 Instead, he thinks that the parameters of these periods must be drawn by the intellectual requirements of history in the present. In particular, he sees the medieval period as literally the middle age — an elastic period link-ing the ancient world (which is hardly recognizable to us in the present) with the modern world (which is the present):

The classifications of world history today are calculated with western Europe at the centre. If we consider that a young, new age is being born (an East Asia-centred age), then we must ask the question of whether or not the established classifications of ancient, medieval, and modern can still meaningfully apply in their current form. If we call this current age . . . the [new] modern age, then we shouldn’t be impeded from lumping the middle and modern eras of Europe together and calling them the [new] middle ages.34

Tanabe is not satisfied with merely observing the nature and meaning of history in the modern period. Rather, he finds within it an ethical impera-tive (ti) to transform the discipline of history, including centrally the history of philosophy and political thought. Indeed, he talks of an obligation and mission in the present to achieve this world-historical standpoint (sekaishi-teki tachiba). Tanabe protests that he is not simply criticizing the West as an outsider from “an unsympathetic standpoint” (dj no nai tachiba) because Western philosophy has already penetrated into the core of Japanese being.35 Japanese thinkers, having opened themselves to the West and to the new worldly world simultaneously, must return to and reinvigorate the conven-tions of the Western history of philosophy as a means to understand them-



selves in the new present. Such a process of rediscovery will naturally involve a cross-fertilization with ideas previously thought of as “Japanese.”

Tanabe was more than happy to acknowledge that he (and the rest of the Kyoto School) could recognize himself and his problems in the once-alien history of philosophy in Europe. If Europe was going to get out of the “mid-dle ages,” historians of political thought there would have to be similarly open to ideas from the history of Japan and East Asia more widely.

How to Recognize a Discontinuity

This creative and ethically driven approach to the history of political thought seeks to revitalize the present by revisiting and reinvigorating the past, by giving voices back to those who have been forgotten or to those whose voices were never heard on the highways of the discipline at all. In other words, if we were to apply the method to Europe itself, the purpose would not be to document and redocument stories of continuities in the intellectual history of Europe qua the history of political philosophy. Instead the field should be interested principally in figures that do not fit the established ethnocentric narratives, but figures in whom the predicaments of the present resonate. Runciman is upbeat about the fact that this is indeed an increasing tendency in the field: “There has also been an increasing emphasis on the instruc-tive value to be derived from the discontinuities in the history of ideas.”36 In Taylor’s words, the quest for these discontinuities requires “recovering previous articulations which have been lost.”37 Runciman concurs that these discontinuities represent “the discarded options in the history of political thought, the forgotten periods during which people in whom we can recog-nise something of ourselves construed the predicament in which they found themselves quite differently from the way we construe ours.”38

However, once again this ostensibly clear opening for the embrace of the non-European in the history of political thought is almost instantly (and apparently inadvertently) trampled by a number of the most eminent think-ers in the field. Just like the question of recognition, the problem here seems to pivot around the meaning of discontinuity. Both of these seemingly inclu-sive terms appear to have become wrapped in a monological safety blanket.

In the same way that Taylor appears to have argued for the necessary



geohistorical contingency of the qualification recognizable, so he has also suggested that the kind of discontinuities in which historians of political thought should be interested lie within European history rather than out-side it. In particular, he argues that there are two important ways in which a philosopher can be innovative: the first is within the dominant philosophi-cal schema of the day (he suggests that in the modern period this should be characterized as the epistemological model, following Descartes), while the second is outside this hegemonic system — it is a discontinuity. Taylor is clear that it is the latter type of innovation that marks the greatest and most significant thinkers (he cites Hegel and Heidegger as examples in modern times); these are Nishitani’s “vital discontinuities.” However, Taylor stops short of suggesting that innovation from outside the narrative of European history should count as innovative or discontinuous with it. Indeed, he states quite emphatically that immersion in the European tradition (i.e., a knowl-edge of the history of European philosophy) is necessary for innovation of this second type; without such a grounding in the history of philosophy, new ideas (no matter how innovative they may seem) are not discontinuous but merely disconnected.39 In other words, Taylor’s sense of discontinuity requires (or privileges) an existing, continuous, and essentially static histori-cal narrative from which the discontinuity can diverge. The existing (Euro-pean) narrative itself is assumed rather than challenged.

Taylor is certainly not alone in this interpretation; indeed it defines the highway of the history of political thought. �or example, Lorenz Krüger uti-lizes the same meaning of discontinuity to explain the innovations of Heide-gger, who searched back through the history of (European) philosophy in his quest to find thinkers who could support his endeavors to overthrow the conventions of Western metaphysics. Krüger stresses the importance of Heidegger’s immersion in the history of philosophy (in Europe), arguing that it is only there that genuine discontinuities can be found. This is why Heidegger “does not turn to extra-scientific wisdom of just any kind, say Buddhism, but to the Pre-Socratics.”40

Leaving aside the question of whether Krüger is actually right about the sources of Heidegger’s innovations,41 it is obviously sensible to assert that a thinker will be aware of the significance of his or her own discontinuities only if he or she is already aware of the narrative from which they diverge.



However, awareness of innovation and innovation itself are not the same thing. In any case, it is nonsense to suggest that thinkers versed in the history of political thought would be unable to recognize the potential discontinui-ties represented by ideas from outside that historical narrative: such thinkers would not spontaneously forget the dominant narrative just because they started to read, say, Buddhist texts.

The problem, then, with this interpretation of the meaning of discontinu-ity is that it is rooted in a particularistic history rather than in the aspirant universalism of philosophy itself. This highway begins to look increasingly like an antiquarian byway in Nishida’s nineteenth century or Tanabe’s mid-dle ages. The real object of Krüger’s lament appears to be the inability of (European) historians of political thought to place non-European ideas into the European narrative, but this is both a symptom of Tanabe’s middle ages as well as a cause: members of the Kyoto School themselves were fully able to recognize the significance of discontinuities presented by (in particular) Zen Buddhist ideas within the (European) history of political thought pre-cisely because they attempted to make themselves familiar with both from a world-historical standpoint. Privileging European history in the history of political thought prevents historians from being aware of the innovations promised outside that narrative — it does not eradicate the “vital disconti-nuities”42 themselves. This attitude reflects the “national self-consciousness” of Nishida’s nineteenth century — the rest of the world exists, but particular nations are uninterested in it and are unwilling to risk their own unities through dialogue with it.

The Martians Are Coming!

There is a second, allied strategy of exclusion that is employed against non-European texts. Even if Krüger and Taylor could be convinced that extra-European discontinuities might be interesting and significant on the osten-sible highways of the history of political thought, it seems unlikely that they would concede that such texts would actually be comprehensible to us as historians of political philosophy.43 Taylor, for example, points to the compli-cated problematic of language as a virtually insurmountable barrier between East and West in philosophy. In a passage that would not be unrecognizable



to Kipling, he argues that languages East and West are so radically differ-ent that there is no commonality between them, which means that “we set off without the remotest idea how even to go about arbitrating” between them.44 He goes on to explain how an alien from another planet would simply give up and go home if asked to engage simultaneously with both a Western conception of personality and a Buddhist view of the self. While it seems to me absurd to imply that philosophical positions expressed in such languages as Japanese, Chinese, and Hindi are somehow more impenetrable to modern historians of philosophy than ancient Greek or Latin, the main problem with Taylor’s assertion is that it is contradicted most persuasively by the history of philosophy itself: Nishida Kitar and his Kyoto School effected a very interesting (and discontinuous) synthesis of Western person-ality and Buddhist selfhood in the early twentieth century. As far as I am aware, all the members of the Kyoto School were from Japan, not from Sirius or Mars.

An implication of both Krüger’s position on narrative and Taylor’s position on language is that “we can recognise something of ourselves” in ancient Greece but not in, say, early Shwa Japan and that consequently insights from Japanese thinkers (even from Japanese thinkers who engaged creatively with the canon of European philosophy, like the Kyoto School) cannot constitute genuine innovations in the history of philosophy or politi-cal thought. This is so despite the fact that it seems entirely plausible that Shwa thinkers (for example) “construed the predicament in which they found themselves quite differently from the way we construe ours,” and therefore are perfect candidates as relevant discontinuities in the history of political thought.

Thankfully, the Cambridge School also seems to open another possible slip road onto the highways of the history of political thought. After all the effort expounded in explaining why we cannot recognize ourselves in people who are not European, it is a relief to see that Runciman does not conclude that it is finally necessary to find ourselves in the work of histori-cal figures for them to be of interest to the history of political thought. He notes that “there are the lessons to be learned from seeing people clearly not ourselves grappling with a predicament that we can recognise.”45

Leaving aside the slightly distasteful idea that there is actually a class



of people who are “clearly not ourselves,” this type of discontinuity does at least seem to sidestep the importance of European identity in the his-tory of political thought (even though it retains the category of a primary European “we”): even people who are clearly not European should be able to gain access to the highway through this gate. The privileged element starts to swing here from European history to political thought itself. There is, of course, an immediate logical roadblock in the form of the “predica-ment that we can recognise,” but this has already been discussed above. In any case, the real (and unexplored) opening provided by this concession is more dramatic and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is not an opening explored by Runciman.

If the Cambridge historians are happy to incorporate into the history of political thought both people in whom we recognize something of ourselves dealing with predicaments different from our own and people in whom we recognize nothing of ourselves dealing with predicaments similar to our own, they must logically also concede that there are lessons to be learned from seeing people clearly not ourselves grappling with a recognizable pre-dicament (which may seem quite different from the way that we construe our own). Suspending for the moment the distasteful “them and us” implied here, such a phrasing would force even the most ethnocentric of historians of political thought to deal with the non-European. In fact, this kind of language might effectively represent the mediational role envisioned by the Kyoto School for “nations” and then “particular unified spheres” (tokush-uteki titsuken) as stepping-stones on the way to a world-historical stand-point. In any case, the priority here is not “us” but rather the predicaments in which we find ourselves; the highway is traveled by political ideas, not by wanderers on the European tour.

In fact, Quentin Skinner, one of the fathers of the so-called New Histo-rians, has long held the view that the history of political thought should be about uncovering the “range of options lying behind a given philosophical or political predicament.”46 In other words, the history of political thought should be organized around competing explanations of particular problems, not around national or regional identities. It does not matter who thought of the explanations; what matters is that they were thought of and that they are interesting and relevant. Hence the history of political thought should be



a quest for intellectual discomfort, for alternatives and discontinuities that make us reconsider and think critically about our responses to the predica-ments of the present.

Given this thematic orientation to the discipline, is there any reason why non-European sources should be excluded from it — is this a sensible princi-ple for a worldly history of political thought? Why can the history of politi-cal obligations not encompass Chinese Confucian texts as well as the Greeks and Germans? Why can the history of subjectivity not include Japanese Buddhist texts as well as the �rench? There appears to be no logical neces-sity for any such exclusions. MacIntyre’s insistence that we have no means of judging alternatives from different cultural traditions because of the absence of an overarching framework (or unifying narrative) and Taylor’s assertions about the absence of a point of contact between East and West seem rather Orientalist (i.e., nineteenth century or middle aged) in this context. In fact, Taylor suggests that the problem of comprehensibility could be solved but that East and West “would have to grow together as civilizations” first.47 As we saw in the last section, the Kyoto School certainly felt that this condition had been met by the early 1940s,48 and a vast literature on globalization and complex interdependence in the late twentieth century reveals an ongoing concern for this issue in many parts of the world.

The real casualty in this reorientation appears to be the idea of progress along a central disciplinary highway. To the extent that the history of politi-cal thought rests on pretensions of progress in the discipline, the involve-ment of extra-European figures causes some angst. Richard Rorty is perhaps one of the most eminent proponents of the notion of progress in philosophy. He argues, for example, that the idea of progress permits us to dismiss Leib-niz as wrong about the existence of god, or Aristotle as confused about the existence of real essences, and he suggests that we are reticent about saying so only because we have colleagues who work on these “different philo-sophical perspectives” today.49 If Rorty is right and historians of political thought do really believe in progress, the admixture of alternative views that have not been overcome on the way to the European present raises some problems — not to mention the political and ethical problems of a Western historian asserting that non-European perspectives are or were wrong or confused. That said, Tanabe was certainly not convinced that the inclusion



of the non-European must destroy the idea of progress in the history of political philosophy — it merely required a reorientation of the meaning of progress, transforming it from developmental to constructive. Of course, it seems very likely that Tanabe’s constructivist approach to historical progress would destroy a great many of the criteria currently employed to judge it; it may turn out that Leibniz was right about the existence of god or that Aristotle was rather passé in his ideas about essences.

To conclude this section, it seems somewhat ironic that leading figures in the history of political thought have attempted to defend the discipline against charges of antiquarianism by effectively (and perhaps unconsciously) excluding the non-European from the disciplinary highway and relegating it to the byways of political philosophy. In fact, it seems that it is exactly this strategy that lays the field open to charges of antiquarianism and ethnocen-tricity because it roots the discipline in a particularist (European, middle aged/nineteenth century) past and shows no awareness of the contradic-tions between this and its own aspirant universalism. In addition to risking parochialism, such exclusionism also demonstrates an absence of political and ethical awareness on the part of historians of political thought living in today’s world, which is an increasingly “intimate, single world-space.” To borrow Rorty’s words, the stubborn perpetuation of a (European) canon in this context risks making the discipline look “quainter and more factitious as the decades pass.”50

Roadworks or New Road Networks:

On the Utility of Repairing the Existing Highways

As Runciman pronounced, “Now historians of political thought are increas-ingly looking to their subject to fill in some of the gaping holes in the think-ing that has been done on our behalf by the current generation of moral and political philosophers.” It was not uncommon at the close of the twentieth century to find historians and political theorists expressing some disillu-sionment about the “renaissance in our political thinking that began with Rawls.” 51 The result was an increased interest in the question of the com-position of political philosophy’s core canon. It seemed to some thinkers that the existing canon was lacking in various important respects. In other



words, there were gaping holes in contemporary political thought that could not be filled by ideas drawn from the existing canon. However, the search for recognizable discontinuities in the history of political thought has heretofore been typified by the uncovering of gaps and structural weaknesses along the highways of European history. A nice illustration of this tendency is the much celebrated Cambridge University Press “blue” series, Texts in the His-tory of Political Thought, which contained 172 titles at the last count — none of which could be considered a non-Western text, despite the assumption of universalism in the series title.52

Runciman is right when he applauds the inclusion of lesser-known names in this important series, such as Baxter, �letcher, Loyseau, and Stirner. He is also right when he calls a halt to any premature tendencies toward self-congratulation in the field. He quotes Siep Stuurman approvingly when he complains that “historians of political thought are still too reluctant to seek out non-male, non-white, non-western perspectives, and equally reluctant to comment on the absence of such perspectives in the major texts.”53 However, while Runciman does point out that the Cambridge series omits all references to the nonwhite, he proceeds to restrict his comments to the limited success with which nonmale positions have been incorporated into the discipline. Pre-sumably the non-Western omissions from the field still constitute irrelevant or unrecognizable byways in comparison with the European nonmale.

Even less satisfactory for historians of political thought who were hop-ing that the “gaping holes” in the contemporary field might be filled from non-Western sources, Runciman notes a slightly disturbing tendency in the mainstream of the discipline. As part of the general atmosphere of disil-lusionment with Rawls, Runciman suggests that historians in the field have increasingly turned their attention back to the early years of the twentieth century when “political philosophy was supposed to be dead.”54 This, of course, is also the period in which the Kyoto School was most active and innovative in political philosophy and exactly the period in which the war-time Kyoto School was working on its philosophy of history. However, Run-ciman notes that “it is one of the ironies of the recent history of the subject that the author whose work has come closest to breaching the confines of the familiar canon of political ideas belongs to an excluded group whose rep-resentatives are not normally considered in need of additional exposure —



that is, card-carrying Nazis.”55 In particular, there has been a surge of inter-est in Carl Schmitt (who was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1936). In a similar manner, we might also note the roller coaster of inter-est in Heidegger’s political thought. Journal articles and books tackling the political thought of figures from Nazi Germany have become increasingly numerous since the late 1990s. As a phenomenon in the history of political thought, such a turn to early-twentieth-century Europe is quite revealing. The implication is that the discipline is still more comfortable attempting to fill the gaping holes in contemporary thought with the ideas of a dead, white, male Nazi (from Europe) than with attempting to grapple with the ideas of a non-Western text in any form. I do not challenge the intrinsic interest of Schmitt’s work, but it seems that the myopic logic of the Euro-pean narrative of the history of political thought can lead historians into rather dubious places in the quest for discontinuities, despite the existence of vast numbers of far less dubious alternatives elsewhere. Conceivably, this is a symptom of an ongoing conservative reaction to the sense of crisis in the history of philosophy observed by Suzuki in 1941.

Runciman himself phrases the interest in Schmitt in terms of a general return to the early twentieth century as an under-researched period in the history of political thought. He is clear that “interest in the political thought of the twentieth century has never been greater.”56

There are two key observations to be made about this tendency in the field. The first and most obvious is that a return to the early twentieth cen-tury (unless it is explicitly a return to twentieth-century Europe) should include rather than exclude eminent, influential, recognizable, and discon-tinuous ideas from outside Europe. In particular, we might point to the father of Japanese philosophy and the progenitor of Japan’s first (and great-est) modern school of philosophy, Nishida Kitar. He was active at exactly the same time as Schmitt and the wartime Heidegger, and he is unquestion-ably a more innovative and important philosopher than the former.57 The second observation reinforces the first: one of the most striking and interest-ing things about the early twentieth century in both Germany and Japan is the extent of philosophical dialogue that existed between philosophers and political thinkers West and East. Indeed, it is not wholly inconceivable that part of the reason for the current interest in the discontinuities represented



by German thinkers from that period stems from the fact that they were themselves interested in the non-European.58 In a very meaningful sense, the early years of the twentieth century represent a pivotal opportunity for the discovery of a genuinely world-historical discontinuity in the history of political thought. However, rather than throwing resources and effort into uncovering the nature and meaning of this discontinuity, the field has almost uniformly failed to notice its existence, has deliberately ignored it, or has marginalized it into the “byways of the discipline.” Even worse, in some cases, such as that of Heidegger, the nature of the discontinuity has been deliberately misrepresented; while it may remain politically controversial to argue that Heidegger was exposed to or influenced by Chinese and Japanese philosophy because it upsets the settled complacency of the European narra-tive of the history of philosophy, there is at least a case to be answered about the possibility of such exposure.59 This is not to say that he was solely influ-enced by nonwhite, non-Western sources, but it does mean that Krüger’s attempts to pull him full square into a European narrative (Heidegger “does not turn to extra-scientific wisdom of just any kind, say Buddhism, but to the Pre-Socratics”) look naive or politically motivated (albeit as much by the momentum of the discipline as by Krüger himself).

In other words, increased interest in the early twentieth century should provide the perfect impetus for historians of political thought to begin the process of incorporating the non-Western into the disciplinary highways, perhaps starting with the wartime Kyoto School and its attempts to define a world-historical standpoint. After all, for Nishida this should have been exactly the moral and historical nature of the twentieth century.

Building New Highways: The Wartime Kyoto School

and the Construction of a Responsible and Inclusive History

of Political Philosophy

The wartime Kyoto School occupies a complicated position in the history of philosophy in general and in the history of political thought in particu-lar. This article has not concerned itself with the content and form of the political thought of the Kyoto School itself, but rather with the politics of its vision of the history of political philosophy.



The dominance of the Cambridge School in the discipline since the 1960s has inadvertently led to an inward-looking and defensive posture, which has perpetuated the marginalized status of the non-European. In Nishida’s terms, the discipline has been held in a kind of nineteenth-century stasis, characterized by a concern for the narration of national monologues. This nineteenth-century standpoint on the non-European approximates the Ori-entalism of Edward Said, for whom, following Michel �oucault’s theories of power and knowledge, images of the Orient in the West constitute a type of colonizing knowledge.60

A symptom of this exclusionary standpoint has been the discipline’s refusal to engage with non-European innovations in political thought, or even to acknowledge that non-Western ideas can find a place in the history of political thought at all. This situation is mirrored to some extent by the circumstances of the natural sciences. As Joseph Needham has persuasively demonstrated, there is a distinct possibility that many scientific achieve-ments attributed to Europe in the age of scientific revolution can actually find their origins in Chinese developments. Needham goes so far as to argue that Chinese innovations constituted “important influences on nascent mod-ern science” in Europe.61 There is a marked reluctance to extend this insight into the field of philosophy — the very possibility appears to create a sense of crisis in the discipline of the history of philosophy.

A particular moment in this crisis is represented by the early twentieth century and, in particular, by the wartime period. In Japan, the philosophers of the Kyoto School were self-consciously engaged in attempts to innovate within the established (European) parameters of the history of philosophy while simultaneously challenging the suitability of those parameters in the twentieth century. At the same time in Europe, a number of high-profile thinkers, including Heidegger, were being influenced by non-European ideas — effectively incorporating non-European sources into the history of philosophy. Unlike the Kyoto School, however, the Europeans were less will-ing to acknowledge (i.e., they were and remain chronically insecure about) this de-centering. While the Japanese had been forced (by the fabled Black Ships of U.S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry) to incorporate the conven-tional (European) history of political thought into their own present, no



such coercion had succeeded in the opposite direction; it is at least debatable that this is what the wartime Kyoto School thought the war was all about. In other words, in the European context, there was no imperative (other than an unacknowledged ethical one) to acknowledge the non-European within the discipline. The disincentive was plain enough: incorporation of the non-European threatened the integrity of the discipline’s contradictory claims to a universalism rooted in the European particular.

Hence the wartime Kyoto School remains unfamiliar on the highways of the history of political thought. Because of its engagement with that history, however, it is also an uncomfortable presence in the monological narrative of the history of ideas in Japan. As James Heisig astutely observes, “The question of locating [the Kyoto School in the history of philosophy] in effect questions the way that we have located philosophies east and west. In this context, theirs is not a derivative contribution but something original and revolutionary.”62

The great contribution of the wartime Kyoto School to the history of political philosophy is to call attention to the need for attention to be paid to it in the history of philosophy. The school’s philosophy of history demands that the present is constructive and creative and that the past is reinvigo-rated and transformed continuously to match the circumstances and needs of the present. The globalized and interconnected world of the present is no longer characterized by the dominance of Europe, so the history of political thought should also be liberated from that dominance, despite the resistance of European conservatives.

If we assume, at least for the sake of argument, that philosophy needs a world forum in which Europe and the Americas do not enjoy privilege of place; that the time has come for the west to accept as part of its philo-sophical inheritance ideas that have flourished in non-western cultures but foundered in the west; that the age of isolating eastern thought from the full weight of western criticism is drawing to an end; and that these were precisely the working assumptions of the Kyoto-school thinkers; then one has to conclude that they belong to that tradition of philosophy in-the-making more properly than any leading movement in western or eastern philosophy of our day.63



In other words, if Runciman is right and the discipline of the history of political thought is now turning its attention to the early years of the twentieth century as a source of recognizable innovation and discontinu-ity, it will find one of the most useful vital discontinuities in the form of the wartime Kyoto School’s philosophy of history. The standpoint of the Cambridge School still holds promise as an appropriate method to uncover the worldly perspective of the Kyoto School and to reveal the early twenti-eth century as a key opportunity to construct a worldly history of political thought. Defenses of the Cambridge School against charges of antiquarian-ism and conservatism have been incidentally rather than necessarily ethno-centric and conservative themselves. Even if “we” failed in the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century “we” (as historians of political thought) should become able to recognize ourselves and our predicaments in non-European contexts.

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author. 1. The most influential, positioning texts are probably Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and

Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 199 – 215, and John Dunn, “The Identity of the History of Ideas,” in his Political Obligation in Its Historical Con-text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 13 – 28. The central contention of the school is that the meaning of historical texts cannot be understood in isolation from their historical contexts but that contexts are not themselves determining. In this way the school opposes “text-only” approaches that claim to be able to interrogate long-dead thinkers with contemporary questions. �ollowing convention, in this essay “New Historians” refers to the Cambridge School.

2. David Runciman, “History of Political Thought: The State of the Discipline,” British Jour-nal of Politics and International Relations 3 (April 2001): 84.

3. Ibid., 89, 96; emphasis added. 4. “�ew university courses in the history of political thought would now exclude the works

of Mary Wollstonecraft, and there is increasing interest in the political ideas of and about women in revolutionary Europe more generally.” Ibid., 96.

5. The content and form of the Kyoto School’s political thought is not what concerns me in this article. The relationship between the meaning and context of Kyoto School political thought has been explored elsewhere; see Christopher S. Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-prosperity (London: Routledge, 2005).



6. Runciman, “History of Political Thought,” 86. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 89. 9. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953; London: Penguin, 2004), opening lines.10. �or a development of this idea, see Christopher Goto-Jones, “If the Past Is a Different Coun-

try, Are Different Countries in the Past? On the Place of the Non-European in the History of Philosophy,” Philosophy 80 (2005): 29 – 51.

11. Charles Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” in Philosophy in History: Ideas in Context, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 – 98), 18.

12. Alisdair MacIntyre, “The Relationship of Philosophy to Its Past,” in Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner, Philosophy in History, 41 – 42.

13. Suzuki Shigetaka also observes this trend in Europe’s apparent dismissal of the United States as superficial and cultureless. In a roundtable discussion that also included Nishitani Keiji, Kosaka Masa’aki, and Kyama Iwao, Suzuki calls on the Japanese not to be fooled by this chauvinism. “Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nippon” (“The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan”), Chkron (January 1942): 189.

14. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1978).

15. Tetsuo Najita, Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1974).

16. The participants of these debates were Nishitani Keiji (1900 – 90), Kosaka Masa’aki (1900 – 69), Kyama Iwao (1905 – 93), and Suzuki Shigetaka (1907 – 88). �or English- language discussions of these debates, see Horio Tsutomu, “The Chkron Discussions: Their Background and Meaning,” in Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Ques-tion of Nationalism, ed. James Heisig and John Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995). In the context of the Kindai no chkoku (Overcoming Modernity) debates, see Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), and Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan (esp. chapter 5).

17. “Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nippon,” 153. The subsection of the debate was titled “Sekaishi no tetsugaku to sekaishigaku” (“The Philosophy of World History and the Discipline of World History”).

18. Ibid., 152. Suzuki goes on to point out that the discipline of Eastern history (tyshigaku) is similarly inadequate. This is not a call for displacing Europe with Japan but rather a call for innovation and progress in historical method to reflect the needs of a “worldly world.”

19. Kyama, in “Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nippon,” 152.20. Nishida Kitar, “Sekai shin chitsujo no genri” (“Principles of a New World Order”), 1943,

reprinted in Nishida Kitar zensh (Complete Works of Nishida Kitar) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965 – 66), 12:427.



21. Nishitani Keiji, Sekaikan to kokkakan (Worldview and Nation View), 1941, reprinted in Nishi-tani Keiji chosakush (Collected Writings of Nishitani Keiji) (Tokyo: Sbunsha, 1986 – 95), 4:298.

22. Ibid.23. Kyama, in “Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nippon,” 152.24. Nishida, Nishida Kitar zensh, 12:428. Nishida does not assert that this single world space

is already unified or complete. He argues that the mid-twentieth century brings Europe and East Asia into a unified discursive space and implies that other regions and nations will join it as their level of technology develops sufficiently to permit them to do so. It is the nature of the twentieth century to tend toward this unity; he does not state that it is empirically extant.

25. Nishitani, Nishitani Keiji chosakush, 4:298. 26. Despite some assertions to the contrary, Nishida’s position here is far from a simple impe-

rialism. There is a sense in which he is pursuing a universal history in the present, but he does not maintain that this should replace national narratives (i.e., Europe’s “crisis” involves a crucial misperception about the nature of history). Instead, national narratives should be maintained while being transcended. The universal “worldly” history will be mediated through the nation to the individual. Similarly, Nishitani is clear that the movement from Mediterranean to Atlantic to Pacific does not require the subordination of the previous periods of geohistory; instead he talks about the expansive intermixing of their waters until they become a single ocean. Ibid.

27. Ibid., 297. 28. Ibid. 29. Tanabe Hajime, Rekishiteki genjitsu (Historical Reality), originally published in1940 and

based on lectures from 1939, reprinted in Tanabe Hajime zensh (Complete Works of Tanabe Hajime) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shob, 1963 – 64) (hereafter THZ), 8:159.

30. In an attempt to thwart the exploitation of his conception of construction, Tanabe suggests that the construction of history is subject to the laws of history in the same way that the construction of a building is subject to the laws of gravity and physics — to attempt to ignore these laws will lead to disaster and the collapse of the construction. “Even if we say that politics is construction, we must accept the direction of reality which makes any construc-tion possible” (THZ, 8:160 – 61). This does not seem like a very good safety check for those who might exploit this constructionism.

31. Tanabe claims that the fall of the western Roman empire has traditionally been seen as the dividing line between ancient and medieval and that the fall of the eastern Roman empire has divided the medieval from the modern.

32. Tanabe, THZ, 8:163. 33. The use of factual events in this way would constitute an investment in the Western positiv-

ist method of history that Kyama rejected as inappropriate to the twentieth century. See Suzuki, in “Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nippon,” 152.



34. Tanabe, THZ, 8:163. 35. Ibid., 164. 36. Runciman, “History of Political Thought,” 90.37. Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 18.38. Runciman, “History of Political Thought,” 90.39. Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 18.40. Lorenz Krüger, “Why Do We Study the History of Philosophy?” in Rorty, Schneewind,

and Skinner, Philosophy in History, 97.41. The controversy over Heidegger’s sources was triggered by Reinhard May, Ex oriente lux:

Heideggers Werk unter ostasiatischem Einfluß (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden, 1989); translated by Graham Parkes as Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work (London: Routledge, 1996).

42. Nishitani, Nishitani Keiji Chosakush, 4:297. 43. I am sure that both Krüger and Taylor would concede the intrinsic interest of many non-

European ideas — indeed, Taylor makes use of Buddhist ideas in his work. The question here, however, is whether they would allow these ideas a place in the history of political thought.

44. Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 30.45. Runciman, “History of Political Thought,” 90 – 91 (emphasis added).46. Ibid., 91.47. Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 30.48. In this regard, James Heisig notes that “one may also conclude that [the Kyoto School]

demonstrated that it is too early to think in terms of a world philosophy except as a general ideal to be aimed at in the future.” Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 261.

49. Richard Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy: �our Genres,” in Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner, Philosophy in History, 49 – 50.

50. Ibid., 70.51. Runciman, “History of Political Thought,” 94.52. Intriguingly, Najita’s Tokugawa Political Writings (1998) appears in a different series (with no

canonical aspirations) specifically for non-Western thinkers, the (abortive?) Cambridge Texts in Modern Politics.

53. Runciman, “History of Political Thought,” 95. See Siep Stuurman, “The Canon of the History of Political Thought: Its Critique and a Proposed Alternative,” History and The-ory 39 (2000): 147 – 66. Stuurman is also not centrally concerned with the question of the non-Western.

54. Runciman, “History of Political Thought,” 96.55. Ibid.56. Ibid., 99.57. A recent treatment of Nishida’s political thought is Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in

Japan.



58. J. J. Clarke suggests that European fascists were at the forefront of interest in Asian thought in the first half of the twentieth century. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought (London: Routledge, 1997), 194 – 97.

59. Graham Parkes, Heidegger and Asian Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987); May, Ex oriente lux.

60. Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). I note that Said is not explic-itly concerned with East Asia.

61. Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society East and West (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 57.

62. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness, 260. Heisig argues that the Kyoto School’s contribution to the history of Western philosophy is “derivative,” and he notes that very little work has been done on locating them within Asian traditions of thought.

63. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness, 260 – 61.


The Kyoto School, the Cambridge School, and the History of Political Philosophy in Wartime Japan

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