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Marsilius of Padua and Ogyu Sorai: Community and Language in the Political Discourse in Late Medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Takashi Shogimen
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Extract

The article explores a cross-cultural approach to the history of political thought. With reference to Maruyama Masao's classic equation of fourteenth-century European scholasticism with eighteenth-century Japanese Confucianism, a comparison between Marsilius of Padua and Ogyu Sorai reveals, behind their ostensibly similar “communal functionalist” outlook, their contrasting views on the role of language as a medium for political communication. Marsilius believed in human's associative power by means of such linguistic communication as oratory and discussion, whereas Sorai underrated speech to favor government by ritual. This contrast has repercussions for the two traditions of political thought in Western Europe and Japan. The exalted status of speech in political communication constituted a mainstream of late medieval and early modern political discourse in Western Europe, whereas the Japanese Confucian idea of government by ritual survived until the mid-nineteenth century when it clashed with European thought then being imported into Japan.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , Summer 2002 , pp. 497 - 524
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2002

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References

I wish to thank Mr. Stephen M. Conway for his help during the preparation of this essay. I have benefited immensely from conversations and electronic communications with Professor Koichiro Matsuda. I am also heavily indebted to Professor Cary Nederman for his valuable advice and constant encouragement. Finally, I am grateful to anonymous reviewers for The Review of Politics for their useful comments.

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32. As in Gewirth's translation, p. 5.

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34. Scholarly works on Sorai's political thought in Japanese are abundant. Secondary literature in non-Japanese languages include McEwan, J. R., The Political Writings of Ogyu Sorai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962)Google Scholar and Ansart, Olivier, L'empire du rite: La pensée politique d'Ogyû Sorai, Japon, 1666–1728 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Translations of Sorai's political works include Najita, , Tokugawa Political Writings;Google Scholarlidin, Olof G., Ogyu Sorai, Distinguishing the Way (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1970)Google Scholar; Minear, Richard, “Ogyu Sorai's Instructions for Students: A Translation and Commentary,” Harvard journal of Asiatic Studies 7 (1977): 5–81Google Scholar; and Yamashita, Samuel Hideo, Mister Sorai's Responsab (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

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37. Mulgan, , Aristotle's Political Theory, p. 14Google Scholar. Although recent scholarship largely shares this view, some experts hold that Sorai's view of human nature was antisocial, and indeed Hobbesian. See Tetsujiro, Inoue, Nihon Kogakuha no Tetsugaku [The Philosophy of the Japanese Study of Ancient Confucian Classics] (Tokyo: Fuzanbo, 1918), pp.633–37Google Scholar; Junsei, Iwahashi, Sorai Kenkyu [A Study of Sorai] (Tokyo: Seki Shoin, 1934), pp.274–78Google Scholar, and most recently Yasushi, Ogata, “Sorai to Shakai Keiyaku” [Sorai and Social Contract], Nihon Bungaku 40 (1991): 78–81Google Scholar. I am grateful to Professor Koichiro Matsuda for these references.

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45. To be sure, however, the ways in which Marsilius and Sorai arrived at this conclusion are obviously different. The Marsilian justification for diverse functional parts in the community was grounded in the diversity of ways in which human desire could be satisfied, not the diversity of human nature as Sorai maintained.

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94. Yukichi, Fukuzawa, Autobiography, trans. Eiichi, Kiyooka (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 134Google Scholar.

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96. Claus Mueller, for example, wrote: “if the linguistic and cognitive capacities of an individual are sufficiently developed, he is able to engage in effective political communication” (Mueller, , The Politics of Communication: A Study in the Political Sociology of Language, Socialization, and Legitimation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973], p.19)Google Scholar.