2015 Volume 22 Issue 1 Pages 37-46
A recently discovered collection of Eitaro SUZUKI (1894-1966) 's research and personal materials includes forty-three notes, which were edited to the Notes on Principles of National Sociology, and other hitherto unknown drafts. In this paper, I inspect these notes and drafts and make the process clear how SUZUKI had changed his earlier concept of natural village. He insisted in his later years that state governance is essential for the occurrence of regional society and administrative groups transform into natural groups. On the basis of SUZUKI’s later perspective, we should reexamine the concept of Gemeinde for the rural study, make empirical researches into community-based autonomy in relation to state governance and search for what the institutionalization of community ought to be.