「啓蒙」思想史としての「社会思想史」

抄録

  In this essay I intend to cast new light on the meaning and method of the history of social thought (HST hereafter). While HST sounds like something unique to Japanese academia, it is not really the case. I propose instead that HST can be interpreted as a Japanese version of the history of Enlightenment (HE hereafter). HE has long been a major field of intellectual history in the West, and HST has made great contributions to Japan’s modernization and enlightenment over the past 150 years since the Meiji Restoration. In doing so, I consider a recent rise in Enlightenment studies in English-speaking academia as a useful pointer to remind us of the universal and timeless value of the classical Enlightenment thinkers and their thoughts. In particular, those influential works represented by Jonathan Israel who are outside of the mainstream intellectual historians are energetically promoting Enlightenment values like liberty, democracy and humanity as the lost legacy of mankind that has been denigrated by postmodernist ideologies in the West.

  HST and HE have four common characteristics. First, they focus on the critical nature of the classical and post Enlightenment thinkers. Second, they consider the interdisciplinary character of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers. Third, HST and HE both highlight the way in which major thinkers of the Enlightenment and after struggled to live their thoughts in the face of new historical realities. Fourth and last, HST and HE are profoundly historically oriented. They criticized the ancient regime of the traditional learning as utterly irrelevant and powerless, and sought to create entirely new sciences geared to the rise of entirely new morals, politics and economy. HST and HE can be revitalized as the effective intellectual weapons for understanding the nature of modern capitalism and democracy, and in particular, for inquiring into the possibilities of 21^st century-globalized society. HST has much to learn from HE in this particular regard since the former is equally affected by the same postmodernist ideologies that never fail to denigrate the universal values of Enlightenment legacies.