From Academic Esotericism to Democratic Symbolism : A Historical Reappraisal of Civil Society Discourse in Postwar Japan
Conférence de Matsumoto Reiji 松本礼二 dans le cadre du séminaire collectif du Centre Japon.
Matsumoto Reiji est professeur de sciences politiques à l’université Waseda (Tokyo). Ses travaux portent sur la pensée politique de Tocqueville, l’image des Etats-Unis en Europe et une approche comparative des intellectuels aux Etats-Unis, en Europe et au Japon.
Mercredi 3 février 2010 de 15h à 17h Salle 2, 105 boulevard Raspail 75006 ParisSummary
Civil society is one of the focal points of contemporary political debates. The proliferation of arguments about the notion, however, is rather a recent phenomenon, although the term itself has a long history since the 18th century. It was rediscovered in the late 1970s by East European dissidents, who found there a strategic basis for resistance to the Communist regime, and Western neo-Marxists followed them in exploring its theoretical relevance to the contemporary world. Then, after the end of the Cold War and with the progress of the globalization of the market economy, broke out a flood of all kinds of civil society literature. Several decades before this new development of the theory of civil society, however, the notion had attracted Japanese scholars and intellectuals, who enthusiastically discussed it and made various inquiries, theoretical as well as historical, into the notion. Indeed, from 1945 to the 1960s, civil society was a very familiar word, even a cliché, to Japanese historians and social scientists.
This presentation describes the historical development of the Japanese discourse of civil society, which preceded few decades the recent rise of interest in the notion, and shows its certain features in comparison with the contemporary theory of civil society so as to relocate it in a more global context.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
crjehess (26 janvier 2010). From Academic Esotericism to Democratic Symbolism : A Historical Reappraisal of Civil Society Discourse in Postwar Japan. Carnets du Centre Japon. Consulté le 14 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/m9jb













































