The Political Process of Tokugawa-era Japan, in 2000 words

The Tokugawa house established itself as the hegemonic military power in Japan in 1600, and it formally received the title of feudal monarch (sei-i tai-shōgun) from the (essentially powerless) emperor in 1603. The authority of the Tokugawa rested, first, on its ruling by far the single largest domain, representing about a quarter of Japan’s agricultural productive capacity in the seventeenth century and, second, on the formal subordination of all other lords to it as vassals. The around 270 magnate lords held their domains as fiefs and were subject to the monarchy’s regulations, which focused on lords’ military capacity, their relations with each other, and the management of their personal households. Nonetheless, in practice the monarchy intervened relatively little in the lords’ rule of their domains. The Tokugawa periodically exercised the right to demand service from the lords—during the long period in which there was no need for military mobilization, this was primarily for various construction projects—but the monarchy did not tax the lords’ subjects directly.

The magnate lords—and the feudal monarchy in the territories it directly ruled—had the power to make and enforce laws and to impose and collect taxes in their domains. For this purpose, each domain had its own administrative and coercive apparatus, staffed by the lord’s hereditary vassal samurai. As late as the sixteenth century, the samurai had been a genuine class of self-equipped knights, holding fiefs from their lords and owing military service in return. However, over the course of the solidification of the Tokugawa-era political order, by the latter half of the seventeenth century the samurai had largely been converted into urban rentiers and civil officials. They lived in the capitals of their lords, and the vast majority received a fixed share of domain tax revenues rather than directly managing their own fiefs. There was a steep hierarchy of income and status among the samurai, with more powerful or prestigious offices restricted to men of a specific wealth and status level. Moreover, the number of samurai attached to each lord was fixed in line with the large armies of the late sixteenth century, and so there were far more candidates than positions in the domain administrations, leaving a large number of men in the relatively lower ranks of the samurai unemployed. Nonetheless, the samurai as a whole were clearly marked off from the population of commoners, who were excluded from service in domain administrations and military forces.

A side effect of pulling the samurai off the land into the castle-towns was that villages (and urban communities) were granted a great deal of day-to-day autonomy as long as they broadly followed the rulers' laws and (for villages) paid their taxes. This situation had the surface appearance of homogeneous peasant population clearly demarcated from a "warrior" stratum who lived by extracting the peasantry's surplus. In reality, the demarcation of the samurai from the "peasantry" in the 16th and 17th centuries left a stratum of small-scale landlords, who had been borderline "warriors" in the preceding era, in the villages. These gentry were formally "peasants," and they were effectively de-militarized by the solidification of the new political order, but they typically lived off the labor of tenants and dependent servants, in some cases retained certain symbolic privileges otherwise restricted to samurai (such as having a surname or carrying a sword), and were nearly universally named as village officials by the domain administrations. Their position was ambiguous, since on the one hand they were responsible for the collection and payment of taxes, which were assessed by the state on the village as a whole, and for ensuring that the peasants obeyed the lords' laws. They could be--and often were--punished by the lords for failure to do these things. Yet, they also paid taxes, and the domain administrations provided them with little in the way of resources to coerce the peasantry. Thus, at the same time as they were the bottom rung of the exploitative apparatus--and themselves exploiters of peasant labor--they both shared interests with the rest of the peasantry and were forced to bow to some extent to the will of the village community and to act as its representatives against the lords.

The fundamental purpose of these political institutions, which are typically known as the bakuhan system (referring to the combination of feudal monarchy = bakufu and domains = han), was to eliminate the tendencies towards destructive conflict within the ruling class that had characterized the centuries preceding the "unification" of the end of the 16th century. By establishing clearly the lines of authority and the distinct powers of different levels within the elite, the ruling class as a whole would be able to focus on living the good life on resources extracted from the productive classes, especially the peasantry. Indeed, on this criteria, it worked incredibly well, providing over two centuries without any serious, armed conflict within the class of lords.

Yet, it was not exempt from the crisis dynamics of a pre-capitalist social formation. For the first century or so, until the early 18th century, both the Japanese economy and the revenues of the ruling class grew comfortably. This was accomplished by an expanding area of arable land, filled by a growing population, paying proportionately increasing taxes. By the early 18th century, however, the availability of additional land for agricultural expansion had been mostly used up. The lords and their vassals, however, found it difficult to curtail their spending to match the newly constrained fiscal situation, and as a result debt (especially to the merchants who handled the transport and sale of tax-rice) expanded throughout the ruling class and some lords began the practice (that would become nearly universal) of cutting into the revenues of their vassals to fill holes in their own budgets.

The response of the lordly class, exemplified by the shogunate's "kyoho reforms" of the 1720s-30s, was to attempt to increase tax revenue, to constrain spending, and to hold down prices for consumer goods and luxuries both by fiat and by restricting commoner consumption. The results of these policies were mixed in the short run, but in the medium to long-term they could not be maintained and had deep unintended consequences. The increase in taxation came just as the reduced availability of new land was encouraging the fragmentation of land-holdings and reducing the margin of subsistence among the peasantry. In this context, protest against higher taxes could only be expected. Indeed, these protests were often led by the wealthy stratum of landowning gentry who were recognized as local village authorities by the domain administrations, since they too paid taxes to the lords.

However, the higher taxes had another, invidious effect on the peasantry. Through the early eighteenth century, the official policy of the shogunate and the magnate lords' domains was usually to encourage the establishment of peasants on independent, household-based subsistence plots in favor of the large gentry estates worked by dependent labor that had been common in the preceding period. This policy never removed inequality within the peasantry, but it did have visible consequences in the distribution of landownership. Yet, the imperative to increase tax revenue came into contradiction with this policy, since the lords' fiscal administrations lacked the capacity to specifically target higher taxes at the wealthiest rural residents--not least because this same gentry stratum typically controlled the distribution and collection of taxes within the villages as officials who simultaneously functioned as the conduit for lords' orders to peasants and represented the peasant communities to the lords. At best, tax increases would be distributed proportionately to landholdings--even though peasants with holdings barely sufficient to support their families in good years could much less afford to pay more--and often (if the recurrent complaints made by poor peasants are believed) the gentry foisted a disproportionate share of the tax burden on their poorer neighbors. Either way, the result was that the poorer and less lucky among the peasantry increasingly found themselves unable to pay their taxes in relatively poor years. In such a situation--unless it was bad enough that the entire village could be mobilized to demand a temporary reducing in the tax burden--the peasants' only option was to ask one their villages' wealthier families to fill the gap with a loan. These loans were typically secured by a fraction of the borrowers' landholdings. But, the interest on such a loan only made the peasants' situation that much more precarious, and it was quite common for such mortgaged land to become the property of the lender and the borrower a rent-paying tenant on his own land. The shogunate and the magnate lords' domains issued orders prohibiting such transactions and the concentration of land that resulted, but they were unwilling or unable to enforce them. The shogunate's prohibition on foreclosure was rescinded two years after it was issued. The lords would not challenge the position of the gentry, who they had in effect deputized to maintain rural order.

The second unintended consequences of the early-18th century "reforms" was that increasing competition for reduced lordly demand increased the impetus for the merchants and artisans of the great cities to seek out cheaper sources of raw materials or regionally produced goods in rural areas. Often, this entailed naming members of the gentry as purchasing agents, thereby linking these wealthy landholders into the Japan-wide commercial network that had grown up to fulfill the lordly demand that the bakuhan system concentrated in the various magnate lords' castle-towns and, above all, Edo. Over time, however, these gentry, even as landlordship and usury remained their primary (and most stable) sources of income, increasingly sought to break out of the subordinate position in which the urban merchants sought to keep them. These rural merchants accomplished this by developing their own expanded commercial networks, increasing the number of buyers with which they dealt or cutting out the middlemen to sell directly to the retailers of Edo, and by promoting proto-industrial by-employments like spinning and weaving among the peasantry. Since the peasants could accept lower wages precisely because they worked in handicrafts only as a side-line to agriculture, gentry proto-industrialists found they could easily undercut the established urban merchants and artisans.

The competition between the established merchants and the provincial and rural upstarts came to represent a signal fiscal opportunity for the lordly class. In return for assistance in assuring relatively open access to the consumer demand concentrated in Edo, rural merchants could be induced to pay back some of their profits to their lords. Conversely, the established merchants of Osaka and Edo would likewise be willing to pay the shogunate for protection of their privileged position in Japan's commercial network. However, these two fiscal strategies were contradictory: if individual domains were going to promote their own producers and merchants, that would have to come at the expense of the established merchants and producers. If the shogunate was to enforce the privileges of the merchants of Osaka, that would entail effectively restricting the activity of merchants and producers in the various domains. This contradiction was the root of the political conflict that accompanied the ascendancy of the shogunate official Tanuma Okitsugu in the latter half of the 18th century and ultimately led to his replacement by Matsudaira Sadanobu. Tanuma sought to assert the shogunate's primacy in fiscal and economic policy; the opposition of the magnate lords ultimately brought him down. Sadanobu's "Kansei reforms" adopted elements from and claimed the mantle of his grandfather the Shogun Yoshimune's Kyoho reforms, but to describe his policy as simply a "conservative reaction" is to miss the point of the conflicts within the ruling class. He removed Tanuma's commercial policies, but he himself as lord implemented policies to promote rural commerce in his own domain and did nothing to prevent other lords' doing the same. He wrote down samurai debt, but he also for the first time organized a merchant-financed and -administered emergency fund for the city of Edo.

From the end of the 18th century onwards, then, the various domains were given a largely free hand to experiment with commercial and economic policies in order to buttress their precarious fiscal positions. In order to formulate and administer these plans, the domains increasingly began to promote relatively low-ranking members of their vassal bands into positions of authority. For the first time since the formative period of the era, something like social mobility among the samurai became possible again, but in addition the trend of experimental commercial policies promoted an expansion of horizontal ties among the middle and lower strata samurai across domains. This arose directly from the orientation of the new policies to the national commercial network but also from the increasing circulation of students studying outside their domains and experts brought in to try to establish some new industry. The middle- and lower-ranked samurai who were appointed as reformists to influential offices were promoted because of their "ability," and this above all meant education, and the academic world of the latter half of the Tokugawa era cut across the boundaries of domain and vassal band.

In addition, what was new about the new commercial policies was not so much that they tried to draw fiscal benefits from cash crops and handicrafts; various domains had been doing that since the beginning of the era if not before. Instead, as an overall tendency, they entailed an even closer relation of cooperation between the domain administrations and the gentry. It was the latter who typically coordinated the introduction of new crops or industries in their localities, who administered programs for inspection or financial support, and, after all, who frequently were the merchants whose activity the domains were trying to encourage. If the lordly class had shied away from challenging the gentry in the first half of the 18th century, from the end of that century onwards they transformed and strengthened their alliance with that stratum. On paper, most domains still officially prohibited the alienation of peasants' lands and many discouraged (or even prohibited) peasants from cultivating crops other than rice or doing non-agricultural work, but in their actual practice they had broadly adapted to the new semi-commercialized economy.

All, however, was not well in the domains. For one thing, the basic problems of small holdings, a heavy tax burden, and debt leading to tenancy continued to plague the peasantry. If anything, the reconstituted alliance between the lords and the gentry only made matters worse, and increasingly, instead of being led in relatively formalized protests against taxes by village officials (i.e. the gentry), peasants attacked not just the domain administrations but also the merchants and landlords who exploited them in debt and tenancy. It is possible to discern especially in the 19th century a growing sense of unease at the threat of popular unrest throughout the elite, including not just samurai officials and intellectuals but also the gentry.

In addition, the fiscal situation of the domains was in many cases improved but far from good. The practice of "borrowing" from samurai stipends remained nearly universal, and periods of relatively healthy revenues and constrained expenses were typically followed by reversions to laxity and burgeoning debt. Politically, the possibility for promotion among relatively low-ranked vassals gave rise to the formation of factions that competed for office. Since appointment to office still depended ultimately on the arbitrary will of the lord, what the different factions competed for was his favor. Since, moreover, the tendency to appoint less elite vassals to office only modified but did not replace the entrenched influence of the lord's highest-ranked vassals--who of course had a vested interest in minimizing disruption to the status quo--their discontent with the policies of a particular clique in office was often sufficient to win its ouster and replacement by competitors. The result was a pattern of periodic reshuffling of the domain administrations, preventing the consistent implementation of reform programs (especially when those reforms challenged the interests of highest-ranked vassals).

Organizational vs. ideological accounts of political struggle

Assuming that the politics is the determination of the actions of the state through the competing claims-making of various groups, including the personnel of the state as an organization, the following are two conceivable ways for one group to gain leverage over others.

1. The capacity to impose costs on other groups through coordinated or uncoordinated collective action. The electorate can impose the straightforward cost on certain officials of refusing their re-election, but this is limited by the necessity of a rather extensive organization to put forward a viable alternative candidate. Outside of the ballot box, large groups can impose costs on the government or on powerful interests, which then make their own demands on the state, via protests that disrupt the normal functioning of social relations and especially the economy. This is the standard sociological account of social movements including the unions and others of the 1930s (epitomized by the wave of sit-down strikes) and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Notably, the more a particular interest group has more members but fewer resources as individuals, the more organization is crucial to mobilizing the one piece of leverage they do have: pure numbers. In contrast, interests with fewer members but much greater control of resources--the classic example being the owners and managers of capitalist enterprises--the more it is possible for relatively uncoordinated actions to impost large costs on policymakers, for instance, removal of support from key officials, or a general slowdown of investment activity, or even the threat thereof.
2. The successful attempt to attach to one's program symbolic markers that, although their application is disputed, are generally accepted as valuable throughout a society. Political struggle is, thus, in substantial part a discursive struggle in which the stakes are such symbols as 'freedom,' 'the general interest,' 'fairness,' 'equal opportunity.' In this kind of account, the civil rights movement was ultimately successful because it was able to position itself as the continuation of political ideals of equal rights that are evident in the American political tradition going back at least to the Declaration of Independence, while their opponents were stick defending regressive racial hierarchy. In this way, the civil society groups that led the movement were in effect able to coerce national political leaders into bowing to their demands at the pain of being de facto opponents of formal political freedom and rights--a position that was obviously untenable in the American political culture. The challenge for this view is accounting for why one set of claims successfully achieves the desirable symbols, while others do not, and in particular that despite relatively rare exceptions, it is established powerful groups that are better able to achieve the labels they seek for their positions.

It is possible to effect a crude reconciliation of these two views by stipulating that the attachment of widely accepted symbolic value to a set of claims is a powerful force for the achievement of unity of purpose and commitment to action among an otherwise large and diffuse group, though it is one such factor among many others. This reconciliation has the virtue of explaining the importance of such discursive fights particularly when one group making claims is numbers-rich and resource-poor, since it is such a group that requires the collective organization and commitment that unifying symbols can help provide; indeed, the emergence of such groups as effective political forces often requires a process to discover shared interests and goals that can serve as foci for mobilization. On the other hand, the proposition that good arguments are not in themselves sufficient to mobilize a diffuse group suggests an explanation for the elite bias of claims to symbolic legitimacy: as much as unifying symbols are tools for collective action, the broader social recognition of the legitimacy of such symbolic claims is as much a result as a cause of successful mobilization.

This reconciliation perhaps would not satisfy a strong adherent to the second viewpoint, which is I think quite prominent in the practice of and commentary on politics. That is because it tends to reconcile the two views only by subordinating the 2nd to the 1st: collective action imposing costs on other groups is the sine qua non of political struggle, and discursive struggle is just one aspect of that, in part contributing to the mobilization of effective collective action and in part merely reflecting the "real" balance of political forces through the lens of journalism and public intellectual commentary within civil society.

The question, for me, is whether there really are cases where by dint of the discursive struggles of the public sphere, officials of the state were "forced" to adopt a policy symbolically marked by as following from a society's generally accepted values, in defiance of the relative capacity of interested groups to impose costs either directly or indirectly via other powerful interests. Of course, it is possible to imagine relatively "low stakes" questions, in which any decision by officials would elicit little positive support or resistance, but this too is a rather belittling suggestion for the role of discursive struggle. On the other hand, if in general both considerations point in the same direction--if that is, at the time at which the crucial decisions are made, the side with the greater practical capacity to impose costs also has won the most desirable symbols for it cause, and vice versa--it might perhaps be hard to distinguish between the two in practice.

Thus, much legislation and practically all regulations issued by state agencies (which often determines the details of how laws are actually enforced) are written with a great deal of input from individual corporations and business groups (or the think-tanks they fund). Such input is invariably phrased in terms of "general" concerns such as economic growth and the minimization of state burdens on private activity and, crucially, consumer choice. When this input plays a key role in the wording of laws and administrative rules, it could be said that officials "accept the arguments" in which the interests of those who make the arguments are presented as of general validity. It could also be said that the capacity of such groups to provide input to the legislative/regulatory process and to have that input accepted is a reflection of their power. The problem is that in the "normal" course of things, those groups don't particularly have to flex their power. It's true that they provide certain material benefits--contributions to politicians, junkets to all kinds of officials--but there is reason to doubt these are, taken individually, sufficient to "buy" officials' support. Nonetheless, it can be plausibly suggested that official deference to the input of businesses and their advocates follows a recognition, "on credit" as it were, that they could, if necessary, impose considerable costs on officials seen as uncooperative--for instance, although the material payments from powerful interests to individual elected officials are insufficient to account for specific policy positions, the threat of exclusion from the entire ecosystem of lobbyist "access" and political contributions would represent a cost that would potentially be politically fatal. Yet, this line of reasoning shades back into the idea that the claims of powerful groups are given "the benefit of the doubt," which does not obviate the need for those claims to be phrased in terms of at least prima facie general validity. If this is so, then it would suggest that attacks on that general validity, which seek to "uncover" its real basis in "partial" or "special" interests would have to be taken somewhat seriously by officials. Of course, "somewhat seriously" might amount to nothing more than a sentence in an official report to the effect that, "Concerns that policy a would be detrimental to public goods x, y, and z were found to be without merit." Symbolic challenge vanquished!

Feudal state formation and class formation

1. Skocpol comments that it is conceivably possible for a state, in a revolution, to act against the interests of the class that is dominant within it. This is insightful, yet simultaneously goes too far and not far enough. It does not go far enough insofar as it implies this is an exceptional state of affairs, when in fact it is a common situation for pre-modern states. It goes too far in suggesting that the state could contradict the class logic of the social-property relations on which it was based. Instead, the tendency for conflict between the state and dominant classes is produced as an essential feature of the class strategies of feudal social property relations.
2. There is a tendency in studies of state formation to treat social groups as "inputs" into the structure of the state, when in fact they are simultaneously "outputs." This is related to tendency, e.g. in Anderson, to see urban classes as somehow external to the feudal social formations.
3. Even Lachmann errs in speaking of the conflict of multiple elites with different institutional bases, when in fact the institutional set-up that defines positions for resource extraction is itself the form taken by feudal state formation.

An outline

I. Principles of Historical Political Economy

1. Feudal vs. capitalist social property relations
2. Quantitative sketch of the longue durée of economic history
3. The dynamics of political accumulation and feudal class formation
4. The transition to capitalism: contrasting England and France in the 16th-18th centuries
5. The bourgeois revolution?

II. The Devil's Bargain

1. State reform and capitalist economic development: Continental Europe in the 19th century
2. The European state system and the world economy: imperial rivalry
3. A senseless crime? The costs and benefits of imperialism
4. The exceptional case: Meiji Japan
5. Class war and culture war: politics in the capitalist states in the late 19th century
6. Socialism or barbarism?

III. The Invisible Statesmen

1. The promise of left-liberalism: J. M. Keynes tries to cheat the devil
2. The orthodox liberal critique: "incentives," "rigidity" and "malinvestment"
3. The Great Depression and the New Deal in the U.S.
4. Postwar Social Democracy in Europe
5. State developmentalism in East Asia, and its less successful counterparts elsewhere
6. The crisis of the 1970s and the neoliberal turn: the devil claims his due

Justice and Traditional Authority

As the local warrior classes gradually wrenched power from the aristocratic estate owners for whom they served as "stewards" from roughly the 12th century onwards, a key milestone was the acquisition of the power to resolve disputes among the peasants of the estate. The importance of this power was that it made the steward the de facto arbiter of property and production relations within the state. Above and beyond the steward's ability to seize land or demand tribute from the local peasants by brute force, the possession of judicial authority gave him a powerful lever to deepen his control of the estate and its resources. As the final authority in disputes over the boundaries of plots, or over relations of subordination among the peasantry (which did exist), or over the transfer or inheritance of land, the steward had the capacity to decide in the favor of the claimant who was more favorable to his own interests (including, in order to gain that favor, willing to make payments or perform services of some kind).

The distributional consequences of judicial authority are visible in other contexts than early medieval Japan. In Europe, the distinction between manorial justice (decided by the lord) and royal justice (decided by officials of the crown's courts) was the essence of the difference between serfdom and the freedom of the peasantry. In England, the crown's justice supplanted that of the seigneurial lords (at least in part) in the early modern era, whereas it was consolidated--in return for submission to the prince's fiscal and military projects--in parts of Germany.

The judicial powers of local lords is an almost archetypal example of "traditional" authority. What the manorial lord in Europe or the local samurai steward in Japan enjoyed was the prerogative to be the one to determine what is "just" within a certain purview. This position, as well as limitations on it, became a matter of "tradition," but its origin lay in the struggle for power between lords and their peasants on one side, and on the other, between different strata of political authorities (the crown and the nobility in Europe, the local warrior families and the courtly proprietors in Japan). Tradition was the sedimentation of the balance of power, and though it became a rallying point for the defense of the status quo, it was always vulnerable to shifts in the balance--typically in favor of "higher-level" political powers in the face of ongoing conflict or peasant resistance.

In other words, though I remember being mystified by it the first time I read it, I've come increasingly to think that Thrasymachus was right. Justice--or, to be precise, the recognized prerogative to declare what is just--is a reflection of the advantage of the stronger. What remains so paradoxical about his assertion, however, is that as a matter of definition, "the advantage of the stronger" is not justice but instead, quite straightforwardly, strength. There is a question, then, why "the stronger" seek to call their strength "justice," instead of relying on unadorned force majeur.

It is, I've always thought, almost certainly irrational to continually fight out the exact balance of power, since the fight itself (say, over how much tribute or service peasants perform for their lords) destroys resources directly and disrupts the process of production. The advantage of the stronger is never absolute, and there are, in other words, costs to the direct test of strength. Given that, it makes sense for both sides to come to a consensus on what the rough balance is. This consensus acknowledges which side has the upper hand, but also enshrines certain expectations on how ambitious it will actually be. This consensus is, of course, fragile--hence the frequency of rebellions over "innovations" by lords or royal officials.

Feudal class formation and the ideology of the modern "upper middle class"

The modern upper middle class outnumbers the narrowly capitalist bourgeoisie significantly, and probably has for the entire history of capitalism. What is more, on the level of politics and culture, the label 'bourgeois' as conventionally used applies as well, if not better, to the strata of educated professionals and technicians, some of whom are employed by capitalist firms (often in support or managerial functions), but many others (probably the majority) are at least partially insulated from the capitalist market by institutional protections, including employment by the state. The intellectual producers and political operators of bourgeois society are usually drawn not directly from the capitalist class, but instead from this "upper middle" stratum.

I would suggest that this stratum is the direct descendent of, and shares important characteristics with, the educated legal and administrative officials of the absolutist states. This predecessor of the modern professional class was a product of the centralizing projects of the state, and bound up with its fiscal apparatus in various ways--indeed, since its rules of reproduction were essentially to secure a share, however small, of the extractive capacity of the state (and in some places, the residual seigneurial powers of the nobility), it can be characterized as a stratum of cadet members of the nobility.

Yet, the specific relationship of these "cadets" to the state's political power generated a set of strategies and orientations that were not only distinctive at the time (and gave rise to conflicts with the old nobility) but also have a clear family resemblance with those of the modern upper middle stata.

1) They were marked by a veneer of individual achievement: inherited wealth and office were important supports, but each generation needed to pursue its own career path (including crucially education), and some amount of competition for positions was unavoidable because the number of cadets far exceeded the capacity (or desire) of the state to provide well-remunerated places for them. As such, particularly in contrast to the aristocracy with its inherited titles and access to the royal court, members of this stratum tended to think of themselves as possessing "merit." This ideology, including the central institutional position of education (not to mention the state itself), has survived to this day.

2) In contrast with the aristocracy, which ideally possessed political power as a patrimony, members of this stratum were clearly agents of greater social powers, whether the monarchy or (in the case of lawyers working to improve seigneurial extraction) the nobility. This was true even if lesser offices were to some extent treated as private property, since the monarchy had a tendency to continually erode offices in its state-building improvisations. This of course contributed to the sense that members of this stratum needed to compete for their positions (and were thus socially mobile on the basis of their merit). Even if they obtained their positions by purchase or patronage, they to a greater extent than an aristocracy that merely enjoyed its patrimonial rights performed a social function (or, at least, rendered useful service).

3) From these factors arose a combination of individualism and a sense of membership in (and tendency to make claims in the name of) a political "public." The importance of this combination was in its difference from the characteristic orientation of a feudal nobility in position of some degree of autonomous political and coercive power. While a cadet official of the Absolutist era (like a professional or upper-level white collar worker today) possesses their own individual "merit" (and more concretely, their educational credentials and social ties), for the feudal aristocrat this kind of self-possession was secondary to mastery over an organization of military subordinates and territorial subjects. Conversely, while the feudal nobility could and did ally to defend the privileges of their "estate," these privileges were directly tied to the maintenance of the nobility's patrimonial political prerogative. The cadet stratum, however, had no such prerogative to defend, and no one of its members could seek to appropriate some substantial segment of political sovereignty--which was the program of the aristocracy right up to the end of the ancien regime (though of course it was always presented as a REclaiming of rights usurped by the crown). Instead, its political orientation centered on the control of the state as an institution--specifically, its openness to "individuals of merit" and to the public made up of such individuals. This has contradictions, no less than the position of the aristocracy (the fragmentation of sovereignty imperils the preservation of the rule of the nobility as a class), namely that there are too many individuals who think they have "merit," and the institutionalization of political power of a politically responsible "public" (i.e., one that excluded unwanted radical views) is far easier said than done. (In this, the notables' turn to Napoleon is the direct parallel of the current obsession of the American punditry with "moderates.")



If we reprise the question: What is the third estate? The answer should focus on these factors, which have more to do with absolutism than the rise of capitalism, and which can be traced as well in the "loyalist" ideology of 19th century Japan. The recognizable modernity of the enlightenment thought that became the discursive grist of the "bourgeois" revolution arises from the continuity of the forms of life of the "upper middle" strata that include the political and intellectual classes, even while the mode of production in which such strata enjoy a partially-insulated existence has been transformed fundamentally.

More European-Japanese Feudalism Comparisons: Vassalage and the Estates System

Another point from Taming the Samurai. Ikegami repeats an oft-made observation that an important contrast between Japanese and European feudalism is that in Europe, the reciprocal rights and duties of lords and vassals came to be formalized and, ultimately, enforced in legal institutions that often retained some independence from the the crown.

Vassalage is, in principle, an exchange: the vassal contributes manpower or other resources to the political and military projects of the liege-lord, and submits to the latter's command in the field and authority more generally, and in return the vassal shares in the benefits of the liege-lord's concentrated political and military power. These benefits can include the guarantee of the vassal's current territory and its defense against external threats and internal rebellion as well as the acquisition of additional territory (or other resources) as spoils of war or as reward for service. The key question raised by this sort of relationship is about the balance of power: to what extent does the vassal need to submit to the arbitrary authority of the liege-lord, which is closely tied to the question of how secure, in practice, is the vassal's independent control of territory, manpower, and material resources. The ultimate check on both sides is violence: the threat against a problematic vassal is forcible removal and replacement following capture, expulsion, or death, while a dissatisfied vassal can threaten to attack the liege-lord, or even ally with other vassals or even the lord's foreign enemies.

What's distinctive about European feudalism was the extent to which the balance of power between (specifically) the nobility and the monarchies solidified into a set of traditional laws, enforced by institutions representing the privileged "estates" of the realm. In some cases (notably England and in Eastern Europe), there were even "charters" that the nobility extracted from the crown, enumerating their specific legal rights. No such formalized rights existed for the vassal samurai of medieval, let alone Tokugawa-era Japan.

There's an argument sometimes made that these formalized rights and the institutions built up around them were the first seeds of the "rule of law" and "representative (or constitutional) government" in Europe. There is a certain plausibility to this: these were ways in which the rulers were constrained by fixed rules and a segment of a ruler's subjects claimed the right to influence elements of state policy, notably taxation. It is even possible to identify specific continuities: e.g. in the extension of elements of the magna carta to the entire population and the institutional development of parliament in England, the birth of a sovereign national assembly out of the calling of the Estates General in France in 1789.

But overall, I'm dubious. The key question, as I see it, is this: to what extent did this process of formalization actually modify the relations between monarchy and nobility? Accusations against individual nobles leading to imprisonment, exile, or execution, and rebellion by segments of the nobility remained recurrent events through at least the 17th c in France--and they were ended not by the guarantee of noble rights (these were indeed undercut by the creation of ever new royal offices) but instead by their increased subordination to the crown. Indeed, as is often the case with traditional limits on rulers' authority, there were often loopholes. Take the requirement that any royal decree, in order to become law, needed to be "registered" by the parlements, which were composed of the judicial officials of a particular region. This would seem to put a clear constraint on the "legality" of royal actions, and yet, the king could compel the parlements to accept the "legality" of his decrees if only he showed up in person. (Even so, in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as in the run-up to the Revolution, it occasionally became necessary to arrest or exile uncooperative parlementaires.)

The point, is that looking at European history prior to the revolutions--in England in the 17th centuries and in France, with repercussions across the continent, after 1789--despite an elaborate array of legal and representative institutions, the ultimate arbiter of political disputes was force majeur, and this "ultimate" level was never all that far away.

The flipside is that although Japanese vassals--the samurai--had in principle no legal rights, they were not without leverage. During the medieval period, they could and did defect from one liege to another. Even when this was impossible in the Tokugawa era, lords could be constrained by the traditional hierarchy of the vassal band, by the general tenor of opinion within it, and in some cases even by the shogunate (the overlord of the lords) to which dissatisfied factions of samurai could appeal in the name of protecting "traditional practices."

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.