Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan

Introduction

The book collects three studies that Maruyama wrote between 1940 and 1944 and published in 1952. The first traces how the Zhu Xi orthodoxy of the Tokugawa period dissolved, above all through Ogyū Sorai, who separated politics from private morality, and through the National Learning of Motoori Norinaga. The second describes a shift from the idea of social order as nature (shizen) to the idea of order as invention (sakui), which he saw as a precondition of modern political thought. Written during the war, the studies implicitly argued that Japan had its own sources of modernity. The English translation appeared in 1974.

Connections

Builds on

• Distinguishing the Way (Bendō)1717 · Ogyū Sorai

More works by Maruyama Masao

• 1946Theory and Psychology of Ultra-Nationalism