Bourgeois individualism

Eiko Ikegami argues in the conclusion of Taming the Samurai that although it's true that Japanese culture never developed the form of bourgeois individualism that is often seen as characteristic of capitalist modernity in Western Europe, there did exist in Japan an analogous, if subordinated, ethic of "honorific individualism." Indeed, she points to arguments (made by others) that a similar concept of individualism, based on aristocratic honor, persisted and played an important role in England in the period in which capitalism was first expanding there.

Nonetheless, she more or less accepts the idea that in the long run (i.e. by the time of the Enlightenment and certainly in the 19th century and since) individualism has occupied a key place in Western European political philosophy, and this is bound up with the social structure of capitalism. For the purposes of her argument, which is just to say that there was (despite some claims to the contrary) a principle of oppositional and innovative behavior in Japanese culture, this makes perfect sense.

Yet, as she does sometime seem to hint, however conventional this depiction of the tradition of western political thought it, there are all kinds of problems with it. In the first place, if there's a principle of innovation in what is usually seen as a conformist japanese culture, there's also a very strong principle of control and conformity in the supposed individualism in the west. So, though Hobbes (who Ikegami explicitly mentions) methodologically begins with the interests of the individual, from this starting point he reasons that individuals must in principle forfeit their free power of decision-making to a sovereign. Rousseau, likewise, argues that since society is impossible without some constraint on each individual, the only guarantee of complete freedom is total submersion of the individual in the collective will of the community--or, to put it another way, that the general will should actually come to replace the individual will. Even such an apparently extreme individualist as Bentham can be caught devising means to control all those individuals (as much as it's not fair to tar the guy for a sketch of a prison he once drew . . .). And that doesn't even mention the dissenters, like Burke, or the thinkers of the early 19th century (e.g. Hegel, Comte) who were above all concerned with identifying some way to reconcile the conflicts of individuals into a social whole.

But there's a second problem, which is that even granting a distinctive strand of "individualism" of western thought, the attribution of the emergence of this tendency to the rise of capitalism is dubious at best. In particular, if one wants to rope in the French Enlightenment with this tendency, culminating with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, one has to make sense of the fact that all this arose from a society, and more specifically from a group within that society, that was anything but capitalist.

All this is probably a symptom of the immense difficulty--perhaps practical impossibility--of the kind of cultural comparison that Ikegami's trying to do. On the one hand: cultures, discourses, intellectual traditions, whatever you want to use as your object of analysis can't really be packaged into easily labeled boxes. Instead (and actually, Ikegami gets this exactly right in the body of her analysis), they are dynamic (indeed competitive) fields of social action. That is to say, they are (I'm going to go out on a limb here) universally characterized by multiple, overlapping positions, which individuals have some flexibility in appealing to in making sense of and in making claims in the context of, their day-to-day interactions with one another. Individual artifacts of a culture (whether self-conscious attempts to state principles or values, or texts that are produced in the process of social life) or defined sets of such artifacts can of course be characterized as displaying certain patterns (e.g. an emphasis on "filial piety"), which can be contrasted with the patterns characterizing a set of artifacts from another time and place (e.g. "bourgeois individualism"), but each of those patterns actually exists in a network of relations with other patterns in its own social context, so the fact that "filial piety" can be identified as a pattern in culture A and "bourgeois individualism" can be identified in culture B is of indeterminate significance; since on the one hand there's semi-concealed tension about who exactly one's supposed to be filial to, and on the other, there's something called "bourgeois propriety" as well.

On the other hand, the whole point of such cultural comparisons is to be able to show the dynamic relation of different cultures to different institutional or structural set-ups. Yet, in practice, the comparison ends up relying on already-established interpretations, as in Ikegami's case the connection between individualism and capitalism. So, in the end, nothing really rides on the comparison: on the one side, a superficial stereotype is invoked, and on the other the meat of the argument offered for the interpretation of the culture in question is presented independently of the comparison. (Indeed, typically the comparison is hived off into the introduction and conclusion.) The comparison is just trotted out either to say "Look, this line of argument is analogous to this piece of conventional wisdom," or else to beat up on some stupid piece of eurocentric prejudice--as in Ikegami's case, she reminds us once again that Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is a total mess.



OK, well that's a total mess, but two morals:

• There's a mystique of comparison in historical sociology, which often relies on stereotyped or overly simplistic images of one the cases being used in the comparison, usually taken as somehow the canonical case that the case the author is actually providing original analysis of is a variant or a contrast.
• Cultural systems cannot be easily be broken down and characterized in terms of "values" on "variables." This is in fact in contrast to elements of the material structures of a society (e.g. economic relations, political institutions, and demographic patterns) that can fruitfully be analyzed in this way. This is just another way of saying that it requires, instead, "thick" description.