Still working though Harootunian's Toward Restoration. I've been trying to make sense of what it is he's trying to do, and I think the right term for it is "humanist history." The model I have in mind is Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, which as the subtitle, "A Study in the Writing and Acting of History"--which could just as well be attached to Harootunian's work as well. The thing is, I think Toward Restoration fails where To the Finland Station succeeds to at least some extent.
Both books are organized into a series of studies of individual writers, in which the idiosyncratic development of each subject's work is intertwined with an overarching narrative of successive attempts to confront the problem of, as the subtitle says, "writing and acting" history. The difficulty of this procedure, as I see it, is that it relies on a basic irony: the author locates each of his subjects' attempts to understand and act in history within a historical narrative that the subjects themselves do not, and probably could not grasp. This is a delicate balancing act, between on the one hand merely showing how each thinker discussed was wrong and, on the other, refusing to bring each thinker's ideas about history into a critical confrontation with the actual course of history as the author understands it.
I should note that I think that both of these extremes can in fact serve as the basis for legitimate forms of historical scholarship. The former, taken to its logical conclusion, views the particularities are intellectuals' arguments and the programmatic statements of political leaders as, if not themselves mere expressions of personal or class interest, then in effect as random deviations around the basic configuration of political and economic forces. The deviations cancel out on average and so in terms of understanding historical development in a given time and place, the work of intellectuals and political ideologues can be treated as instrumental to the conflict among groups with concrete interests defined by the structure of social relations and institutions. This is, in fact, more or less the kind of history (let's call it "social") that I want to write. The latter I take to reflect the predominant approach of the academic humanities disciplines, in which texts are interpreted and analyzed as part of ongoing traditions of thought. History provides context, but ultimately the "action" as it were is in the continuity and change among texts themselves.
The kind of humanist history that Harootunian is trying to write rejects both of these options. He doesn't say so explicitly (though his 1990 preface says something like this in opaque post-structuralist terminology), but his objection to social history is that it doesn't take historical actors' work of interpreting the world seriously and to the academic humanities that, ultimately, why should we care about the thought of, say, Yoshida Shoin except insofar as it can be seen as an attempt to grapple with real historical problems that we also feel the salience of?
I call the attempt a failure because he is unable to muster the necessary irony. He falls into a mere restatement of the doctrines of the thinkers he discusses; indeed, he could even be said to be inflating them by rewording them into his own terms. His subjects are ultimately spared the reckoning with history. To put this another way, Harootunian never critically assesses how his subjects' ideas interacted with social actions and relations in practice. He's constantly talking about how they "created spaces" or "conceived of action" with their thought, but there's no discussion of what the "political space" of the 1850s-60s, or even of the Meiji era, actually looked like, or of what kinds of actions had a decisive impact on the history of this period. This is a problem because (and Harootunian doesn't hide this fact, he just fails to work out its implications) the ways these writer developed their thought had only the barest relationship to how things actually developed. Expulsionism was an utter failure by the mid-1860s and the "restoration" of imperial rule was in practice merely the cover for the formation of an authoritarian central state run by a small clique of former samurai, which in the course of 1870s ejected from government, alienated, and suppress with military force many of the staunchest advocates of the ideology that had ostensibly moved the restoration movement in the previous decade. What is more, insofar as many of the ideas of the imperial loyalists lived on, their legacy was in the virulent militarism and ultranationalism of the later meiji era and, even more so, the 1920s-30s.
Yet, you would know none of this from Harootunian's analysis. The result reduces to the standard text-centric methodology of the academic humanities dressed up with pretensions of providing insight on grand generalities like "history" and "action" and "political space."
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