国家社会主義の発想様式

北一輝・高畠素之を中心に

抄録

It is generally known that a country trying to modernize itself in a short space of time is often confronted with the problem of fulfilling two divergent requirements at the same time. On the one hand it must establish a powerful state to exercise effective control over industrialization, and on the other hand it must deal with the popular demands for economic equality which are caused by the profound changes in social life. Just out of such twofold necessities, there are born varied types of national (or state) socialism, which aim in any case at the synthesis of nationalism and socialism.
One of the most early exponents of such ideas in Japan, was perhaps Kazuteru Kita, who in his first work on “National Polity and Genuine Socialism” tried to interpret the new ideals of socialism in terms of traditional values. In this article, we first examine the contents of this book, and show how Kita combined the idea of socialism with that of nationalism. He was a young socialist, but he was an ardent patriot and an admirer of the Emperor Mneiji as well. He believed in the truth of socialism, but he sought some principle which could do justice to his own romantic view of the royal traditions. He found in the doctrine of evolution the very tenet which could satisfy in somewhat mystical way both the demand for socialism and that for patriotic nationalism. In brief, he was a socialist caught in the toils of the evolutionist conception.
Takabatake was another example of a socialist who tried to demonstrate that a true socialist should be of necessity a true nationalist. Unlike Kita, he was a true disciple of Marx, and translated the voluminous “Kapital” into Japanese for the first time in this country. He studied the Marxian theory on state in detail, and found that both Marx and Engels were not right when they thought that the state would disappear or die away after the communist revolution. On the contrary, Takabatake asserted that the state would recover its own genuine function after the abolition of classes, since the existing state is only an instrument in the hand of the capitalist class to exploit the suppressed people, and was thus not a genuine state.
He tried to formulate his own theory of state on the premise that the masses were seeking instinctively both for a powerful government and for socialistic equality, especially in the era after the World War I. He knew more profoundly than any one that the socialization of the state and the nationalization of socialism were inevitable in the middle of 20th century.