This chapter traces the history of Japanese social science in five successive “moments” or intellectual orientations that defined problems, structured analysis, and drove disciplinary development. Importantly, they also helped to set the terms of collective agency in public discourse: What was Japan? — a nation of imperial subjects? of classes? of “modern” individuals? a single Volk? The account is biased toward elite institutions and scholars, largely because social science in Japan, as in many “late developers,” grew out of state concerns and developed as an unequal contest between elite and nonelite scholarship; there was no “free market” of ideas. It is also formalist, in the sense that I see “social science” in terms of the self-consciously professional activity of practitioners themselves.

NEO-TRADITIONALISM AND THE HEGEMONY OF THE PARTICULAR

Japan was the first successful modernizer in Asia. Determined to resist Western domination, elites of the Meiji era (1868–1912) had undertaken a forced march to industrialization and military power through the relentless taxation of peasant production. Initially, this effort was supported by a somewhat free-wheeling Anglophilia. Social Darwinism, the theory of progress, and an ethic of individual and national advancement were the keynotes. Meiji’s state makers understood, however, that Japan could never be a pioneer in industrialization or empire building. They sought cultural self-preservation and national strength while avoiding the pitfalls that beset the pioneer: in short, effective followership.