“Implicit in Aizawa’s confused rhetoric was he idea of an emperor who was both virtue and power, who was being but was involved in doing, who adjusted but also acted”

This comes from Harootunian's Toward Restoration. It's an intellectual history of the lead-up to the Meiji Restoration. This sentence is typical in the way it tried to present that history as a dramatic development: Aizawa was "confused", such that even as he affirmed the well-established delegation of authority by the emperor to shogun and lords, he was laying the "implicit" basis for a different, indeed revolutionary idea, in which the political power of the shogun could come into conflict with the actual manifestation of the authority of the emperor.

On the one hand, I acknowledge in principle the validity of this kind of historiography: historical action occurs within a symbolic environment. Individuals have to make an effort to understand the conditions and forces at work around them, and when they act, it is articulated through the understanding they are able to come to. As conditions change with time and interact with social action, the understanding too will develop, and this is the medium through which social actors adapt to their changing reality. The narrative of this development of the understanding of social reality is thus an important part of making sense of history.

Yet, on the other hand, in a work like Harootunian's, there seems to be a more dubious tendency for the internal drama of interpretations of the world to supplant the complex of social relations of which discursive interpretations are one moment. There is no historical imperative that actions should follow from, or even be compatible with, the principles that intellectuals of a given time and place announce as authoritative. Precisely because historical texts are almost always "confused" on some level, when individuals take the understandings of an intellectual milieu and turn them into action, there is any amount of room for flexibility.

In fact, Tokugawa-era Japan is an excellent example of this, for even as its prominent ideologues (such as Aizawa's teacher Fujita Yukoku, as described by Harootunian) were declaring the need to strengthen the traditional class structure, including the primacy of the "military" ruling class and the division between peasant agriculture and urban commerce, the very reassertion to lordly authority vis-a-vis a "corrupt" shogunate that was being accomplished by the ostensibly traditionalistic kansei reforms of Matsudaira Sadanobu in fact created an opening for various domains to experiment with the promotion of commerce in rural areas and the granting of increased administrative authority to lower samurai and even gentry to accomplish these new economic initiatives. Thus, the intellectual tendency, which Fujita represents quite well, to extol the consolidation of the political position of lords in their domains was indeed a guiding trend of the period, but it manifested itself in policies that cut against the letter of the social order these same intellectuals claimed to defend. Indeed, whether or not the intellectuals acknowledged it, the results of these policies would have deep consequences for the social environment that their successors--not to mention the political leaders they sought to influence--would confront in subsequent decades.

Marx and Engels show a healthy suspicion when, in the German Ideology, they warn against taking historical epochs "at their own word" by reproducing without criticism the representations intellectuals of a given period leave behind of their own society. Leaving aside any mechanical theory that such statements are mere representations of class interests, it does remain the case that they are the product of groups of people whose position in society is based on the prestige of the discursive tradition of which they are the designated guardians. Tokugawa Japan is not unusual in that many of these ideologues are quite literally salaried functionaries, maintained by rulers precisely to teach and write on it. Yet, the practical relationship between the rulers and the intellectuals is in no way fixed in stone: the classic image of ideology, in which intellectuals provide a sugared image of society to legitimate it, is one possibility. Another is that intellectuals are perfectly analogous to the craftsmen, artists, musicians, and so on who elites also tend to support simply to provide an aesthetic gloss to their lives, or to assert all the more powerfully their position as elites--in such a case, it is imaginable that intellectuals are given a certain free hand to develop their discourses that matches with the practical irrelevance of what they write to the actual exercise of their patrons' rule. Yet another is that the intellectuals are technicians of the rulers, producing tools that will indeed--though here again, probably only at the selective discretion--be put into practice by elites in their strategies of domination. Indeed, these possibilities are not mutually exclusive: individuals might do all of them and others at different times or in different contexts.

The point is that the concrete connection between intellectuals and the other relations of society matters immensely for making sense of how the texts such people produce fit into the flow of historical social life. It cannot be presumed that the internal drama of the contradiction and development of principles in the discourse of intellectuals itself amounts to the development of political action or economic behavior or any other kind of social relations. The emergence of a concept of imperial rule is certainly an important historical question about the twilight of the Tokugawa era in Japan, but the relationship between the emergence of such a concept and the collapse of Tokugawa rule in favor of the supposedly direct authority of the Emperor must be understood as an open question--which cannot be answered by appeal only to the logic of the texts in which the concept appears.