Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 254 pp.

Extract

One of the key narratives of political modernity is that of the emergence of human agency in constructing the social order, with theories of divine origins giving way to the notion of humans as lawmakers. While such narratives often center on the death of God and the wresting of sovereignty from monarchs, Reconfiguring Modernity reminds us that they also tend to establish another adversary: nature. Modernity is commonly thought of as a linear movement away from nature or as a dialectical overcoming of nature, which establishes human agency and freedom over and against nature. The prime example for Thomas is Maruyama Masao, a renowned political philosopher who attributed Japan's militaristic nationalism to its failure to establish the primacy of invention or human agency over nature. Thomas questions this conception of modernity based on an opposition between human agency and nature. It is not by negating or overcoming nature that modern political freedoms emerge, she argues. Rather political freedoms come of specific ideological configurations of nature (cosmos) and society (polis). Reconfiguring Modernity thus turns to the history of the idea of nature in Japanese political thought to reconsider the formation of modernity in Japan.