Introduction
All students of the theory of international relations (IR) at Japanese universities encounter the name Kōsaka Masataka (1934–1996) in syllabi, references, and reading lists. The second son of Kōsaka Masaaki, a prominent figure of the Kyoto school of philosophy, Masataka engaged with international relations from theoretical and historical perspectives for over thirty-five years, from the late 1950s until his death. As an active public intellectual, he regularly appeared on television, in magazines, and at public lectures to discuss domestic and global issues. Kōsaka defined realism as an approach that “tries to deal with existing conflicts among states as if they were simply power struggles,” adopting it as his own stance.Footnote 1 Like his predecessors (e.g. E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau), however, he was not solely preoccupied with military power. His ideas encompass much of what is today referred to as liberal internationalism.Footnote 2 Despite his relatively early death, his students and the subsequent generation came to constitute an important part of the Japanese IR tradition. If one were to identify a Japanese IR scholar to contribute to advancing non-Western IR theory, Kōsaka would be a strong candidate. In the words of Hattori Ryūji, the author of his biography, “I do not know if he was the number one [international theorist], but he was certainly the only one.”Footnote 3
What made Kōsaka “the only one”—and what made more systematic and scientific IR scholars perplexed—was his sustained interest in civilizations. Although previous research has generally left this point ambiguous,Footnote 4 the idea of civilization and the “energy” that sustains it were integral to his overarching argument, just as Morgenthau’s pessimistic view of human nature and Reinhold Niebuhr’s concept of “original sin” were integral to their respective notions of realism. As an expert in politics and diplomacy, he described his “mission” as “to ensure that Japan is not defeated again,” connecting it to the preservation of the country’s moral quality rather than, for example, to the development of the country’s foreign policy or defense strategy.Footnote 5 The catalyst behind this seemingly strange link between politics and morality was his concept of “civilization.” Agreeing with Arnold J. Toynbee, Kōsaka observed that “the rise and fall of a civilization is ultimately determined by its interior.”Footnote 6 In his view, then, analyzing politics alone could not fulfill the mission of IR theorists; they also had to preserve moral excellence and vitality. His international political theory thus served as an art aimed at upholding civilization. Although Samuel Huntington is often credited with reviving the civilization debate in international political theory,Footnote 7 Kōsaka’s earlier work calls that narrative into question, revealing that civilizational debates had never disappeared in the first place.
By examining Kōsaka’s IR theory, with a particular focus on his discourse about civilization, we demonstrate how intellectual history can enrich our understanding of contemporary non-Western IR (and, more broadly, global IR). In an era of “rapprochement” between IR theory and intellectual history, this approach complicates the very notion of “non-Western.”Footnote 8 To do so, this article places Kōsaka within the Kyoto school lineage going back to Nishida Kitarō—likely the most important modern Japanese philosopher—who continually made fixed dichotomies fluid, such as subject/object, to make/to be made, and being/nothing. Although he did not write extensively about politics, many of his disciples widely discussed—and often actively engaged with—politics across a broad ideological spectrum. The most notorious example of this engagement was the wartime effort by four Kyoto school scholars, including Masataka’s father, Kōsaka Masaaki, to justify the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Asia-Pacific War (the Pacific theatre of World War II). The four collectively proposed a pluralistic worldview to replace the Wilsonian international order (which they rejected as the Anglo-Saxon world order), advocating for what Leopold von Ranke called moralische Energie as the vital force needed to realize this proposal. Against this intellectual backdrop, Masataka developed his own theory of civilization, appropriating the idea of pluralism and moralische Energie. The connection between father and son here has often been blurred, as their arguments have entirely opposing political implications.Footnote 9 Nevertheless, we argue that it was precisely their shared intellectual lineage that gave rise to such divergent political implications.
The complex and ambivalent relationship between the wartime Kyoto school and Kōsaka Masataka in the postwar era reveals how an influential IR theory that endorsed the US-led international order originated from an anti-American vision. The Kyoto school invoked the concept of pluralism and moralische Energie to counter the “Anglo-Saxon” worldview. Masataka, however, transformed these arguments to support the US-led liberal international order. In a kind of point symmetry, the implications of these ideas were inverted between the wartime and postwar eras.Footnote 10 In other words, this article reveals a profound shift in the political implications of the two concepts of pluralism and moral energy across two different generations—the transition from an era seeking the morality of war to an era seeking what William James termed “the moral equivalent of war.”Footnote 11 This paradoxical trajectory of ideas demonstrates how the Western/non-Western IR binary can lose analytical traction. The four Kyoto school scholars—all experts in Western philosophy or history—criticized the alleged Anglo-Saxon global domination in a manner informed by both Western and non-Western intellectual resources: namely the German concept of moralische Energie and the Chinese and Japanese concept of qi (vital energy). Kōsaka the son endorsed a liberal international order (often criticized as Western-centric) by drawing on the Kyoto school’s criticism of Anglo-Saxon hegemony. “Western” and “non-Western” are thus intertwined at multiple levels, their arguments eluding straightforward either/or categorization.
In the following sections, we first briefly outline Kōsaka Masataka’s life and vision of IR, including his theory of civilization, and highlight how he viewed “energy” or “vitality” (katsuryoku) as the key to strengthening civilization. This section also aims to provide a general introduction to Kōsaka for readers who may not have expertise in Japanese international relations. We then trace the origin of this pivotal, yet ambiguous, concept back to moralische Energie, a concept discussed by the four Kyoto school scholars at the Standpoint of World History and Japan roundtable as they articulated their stance on war. Kōsaka later appropriated this concept in the context of postwar pacifism, seeking to maintain “energy” through the structure of “pluralism,” another Kyoto school theme; in doing so, he attempted to position Japan as a pillar of the liberal international order. Finally, in the Conclusion, we explore the implications of this conceptual genealogy spanning two generations for non-Western IR theory.
Kōsaka Masataka’s international political thought and civilization argument
Born in Kyoto in 1934, Kōsaka Masataka spent his childhood during the protracted belligerency that began with the Sino–Japanese War in 1937 and expanded into the Asia-Pacific War, which ended in 1945.Footnote 12 Unlike Tokyo and other major cities, Kyoto suffered only minor damage from air raids. This relatively good fortune would later give his opponent, Sakamoto Yoshikazu, the impression that “this person didn’t experience the ‘wounds of war’ to the bone.”Footnote 13 However, the young Kōsaka was deeply wounded by Japan’s defeat, writing to his family that “this is a humiliating thing … I will study hard and make Japan truly strong and great in everything.”Footnote 14 Although not uninterested in philosophy, he chose to study at Kyoto University’s Faculty of Law, where courses in political science are traditionally offered. In the preface to International Politics, he expressed gratitude to two renowned faculty members: international legal theorist Taoka Ryōichi and political scientist Inoki Masamichi.Footnote 15 Soon after obtaining his bachelor’s degree, he secured an academic post as an assistant at the same university—a common practice at the time for promising students.
Kōsaka’s academic talents were recognized not only in Japan but also in the US. In 1960, he received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, enabling him to spend two years as a visiting researcher at Harvard University. While researching the Vienna system, he turned his attention to US policy toward China, working under the supervision of J. K. Fairbank, an expert in Chinese studies. Fairbank praised Kōsaka to the Rockefeller Foundation as “a first-rate investment.”Footnote 16 This assessment was shared by K. W. Thompson, the facilitator who steered the organization toward “realism.”Footnote 17 After interviewing Kōsaka, Thompson “was much impressed with him and with his research interests. K[ōsaka] is sufficiently impressive that KWT wonders if we should not approach him about a possible IRP [individual research project] award at some future date.”Footnote 18 In contrast, several years later, Thompson felt disappointed with scholars from Tokyo University’s International Relations Research Group, which the Rockefeller Foundation supported. “Men like Masataka Kosaka at Kyoto,” he noted, “while junior to them, are every bit as creative and able.”Footnote 19
Soon after his return from the US, Kōsaka came to be known as a distinguished new-generation IR theorist, with the publication of “A Realist Theory of Peace” in late 1962. He wrote to Gerald Freund, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship adviser, saying that, while writing it, he had “read again Dr. K. W. Thompson’s ‘Political Realism and the Crisis of World Politics’ and received a great benefit from it.”Footnote 20 The article was a respectful yet rigorous criticism of the “idealist” Sakamoto Yoshikazu, who had advocated the establishment of United Nations forces and the withdrawal of US troops from Japan, contending that the US–Japan alliance exposed Japan to a perpetual nuclear threat and was therefore fundamentally flawed.Footnote 21 Kōsaka countered that Sakamoto’s vision would create a power vacuum in the Pacific, upsetting the balance of power in the region.Footnote 22 If one were to identify the so-called “First Great Debate” between “realism” and “idealism” in Japan, this would be the prime candidate. However, much like the actual “First Great Debate,”Footnote 23 this conflict was more complicated than this framework suggests. Sakamoto, despite being labeled an “idealist,” was a student of Morgenthau at the University of Chicago and considered himself a realist, and Kōsaka never simply abandoned “ideals.”Footnote 24 In this sense, Kōsaka’s paper may best be understood as an illocutionary act intended to enhance the value of “realism” and appropriate it. Some years later, he expanded on the arguments of the “debate” in his still widely read book International Politics, where he depicted international politics as a complex composite of power, values, and interests.
While establishing himself as a realist IR theorist, he began writing about a politician who embodied “A Realist Theory of Peace”: Yoshida Shigeru, prime minister of Japan from 1946 to 1947 and again from 1948 to 1954. Yoshida, he argued, had crafted Japanese foreign policy around the following principles: strictly limiting military power and its associated costs, compensating for this limitation through the US–Japan alliance, and directing Japan’s resources toward economic development and trade.Footnote 25 This was precisely the vision that Kōsaka held for Japan’s future as a “maritime nation.”Footnote 26 By aligning his own vision with Yoshida’s, he presented postwar Japanese policy as “realist,” thereby sharpening his criticism of “idealism.”Footnote 27 When he wrote extensively about Yoshida and his legacy, Ikeda Hayato and Satō Eisaku (students of the so-called “Yoshida school”) were running long-term administrations as prime ministers. Kōsaka’s interpretations of Yoshida likely helped reinforce the ideational foundations of the Liberal Democratic Party’s contemporary policies. Indeed, Kōsaka frequently served in an advisory role for LDP prime ministers, Satō included.
Despite his active involvement in politics, he devoted considerable effort to exploring the history of international relations. He consistently favored a historical approach over a theoretical one. This preference was evident even before he entered university. On the last page of G. P. Gooch’s From Bacon to Halifax: Political Thought in England, he wrote, “Gooch’s accuracy as a historian fascinated me more than any theory.”Footnote 28 This passion reverberated throughout his final book, which emphasized the vital role of history: “we cannot understand the world without theory, but theory without history is dangerous and largely harmful.”Footnote 29 Kōsaka later confessed a desire to have studied under Herbert Butterfield in Britain rather than the US, and on another occasion he criticized Morgenthau’s lectures for having been overly theoretical.Footnote 30 For Kōsaka, “history is the great treasury of all lessons, and especially an excellent textbook for suggesting what power is.”Footnote 31 His research on the Vienna system—perhaps the distillation of “the great treasury of all lessons”—resulted in The Maturation and Collapse of Classical Diplomacy, published in 1978.
What captured his historical imagination the most was the collapse of civilizations. Even while at the National Elementary School, he was fascinated by a vivid story about the Punic Wars and the fate of Carthage.Footnote 32 This early experience sparked an enduring interest in the fall of political entities, culminating in his distinctive decision to spend an academic sabbatical in Tasmania, where indigenous culture had been irreparably damaged by British colonial policy. As a reader of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, he must have been reminded of its opening chapter in which a British writer confesses, “we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought … upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians.”Footnote 33 This six-month stay enabled him to develop and refine his perspective on civilization, which led to several of his most popular works, such as Thinking on a World Map (1968) and The Time When Civilizations Decline (1981). He most likely had plans to write further book-length histories on the declines of Britain and Japan, but his premature death robbed him of the opportunity.Footnote 34 Still, as mentioned in the introduction, ideas about civilization were central to his thinking. The remainder of this section outlines his views on civilization and his ambiguous, yet critical, concept of “energy” as the driving force behind civilizations.
When Kōsaka used the term “civilization(s)”—typically without defining it—he was essentially following one of the two interpretive traditions: the idea of civilization in the singular or that of civilizations in the plural.Footnote 35 The idea of a singular civilization was almost inseparable from that of progress, in contrast to “barbarism.” As clarified in J. S. Mill’s justification of benign despotism, civilizational progress often had colonialist implications in modern history. Liberal journalist J. A. Hobson noted that “all interference on the part of civilised white nations with ‘lower races’ is not prima facie illegitimate,” while Hans Kohn observed that “inequality in the level of civilisation and civilising energy are of the very essence of imperialism.”Footnote 36 Both passages appeared in A. P. Thornton’s Doctrines of Imperialism (1965), which Kōsaka read closely, noting down “Hans Kohn’s words” and the corresponding page numbers, commenting that “we can see how strong the justification by civilization was at that time.”Footnote 37 He later quoted these remarks by Kohn and Hobson on civilization in his International Politics under “Industrialization and Power Politics,” implying that the defining feature of modern, singular “civilization” was the development of industry and technology.
Kōsaka was not an antimodern visionary, but he was deeply concerned about the consequences of modern technological civilization and the unprecedented pace of its development. This led him toward nostalgia, as evident in his assertion that “the Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may well turn out to be the best era for mankind.”Footnote 38 Behind this nostalgia lay the twentieth-century shift in international politics brought about by the production of uniquely destructive arms, including nuclear weapons.Footnote 39 As a result, diplomacy and war could no longer be regarded as a series of “games.”Footnote 40 Indeed, like many conservative thinkers, Kōsaka seemingly felt that technological development had deprived humanity of a certain nobility, as reflected in his disappointment with Harold Laski’s The State in Theory and Practice, which he read in his first year at university. “Mill’s political science was sincere,” he wrote. “If so, then the faults of this book are those of twentieth-century political science, or perhaps of twentieth-century humanity.”Footnote 41
Despite his full recognition of the impact of the singular, modern technological civilization, it was a pluralistic interpretation that formed his theoretical core. One of his inspirations was Toynbee, a creator of the grand panorama of multiple civilizations who was widely read in postwar Japan. More than fifteen of his books have been translated into Japanese, including Civilization on Trial and The World and the West, as well as his massive twelve-volume work A Study of History. Because Toynbee’s universal history rejected the privileged status of Western civilization, several Japanese intellectuals—Kōsaka included—perceived it as a means of encouraging the non-Western world to begin a counteroffensive movement against Western expansion.Footnote 42 These intellectuals often (incorrectly) believed Toynbee to be describing Japan as an independent civilizational unit, flirting with the idea of Japan bearing a special mission to surpass the West; ironically, Toynbee’s efforts to overcome Western parochialism became a justification for Japanese parochialism.Footnote 43 In stating that “Japan is neither the East nor the West,”Footnote 44 Kōsaka was not entirely free from such ethnocentric tendencies. Even so, he managed to restrain this tendency relatively well, emphasizing the transformative potential of communication between “civilizations” rather than advancing a romanticized future mission for Japan based on its alleged uniqueness.
While Kōsaka’s view of Japan as an isolated civilization may be reminiscent of Samuel Huntington’s later and influential thesis of the “clash of civilizations,” there are several notable distinctions. For one, Huntington divided extant civilizations into eight categories, citing Japan as an example of “a society and civilization unique to itself.”Footnote 45 Moreover, Huntington portrayed the cultural differences between Japan and the US as an obstacle to their mutual understanding.Footnote 46 Although his characterization of Japan’s civilizational status appeared acceptable to Kōsaka,Footnote 47 the emphasis on clashes along fault lines ran counter to his focus on communication and internal change. Despite his acknowledgment of civilizational plurality, he cautioned against assuming that differences between civilizations necessarily lead to hostility or potential warfare.Footnote 48 What he must have understood well was that the alleged cultural identification could serve as a justification for forceful expansion. Indeed, the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere sought to create a comprehensive political and economic order on the pretext of cultural identity. Conversely, Huntington’s underestimation of this pretext led him (at least in part) to predict that “the likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low.”Footnote 49
If Japan is a civilizational unit that could decline and collapse, then the young nationalist’s dream of ensuring that Japan would never lose again hinges on the viability of this civilizational unit. As mentioned in the introduction, Kōsaka found in Toynbee the perspective that civilizations decline as a result of moral decay. He referred to this decisive internal factor as “energy” (katsuryoku) in various contexts. For example, he translated the term “going concern,” which Halford Mackinder used to describe organizational efficiency, as “energy body” (katsuryoku tai). This term “energy body” was used in a more favorable vein to depict Venetian excellence.Footnote 50 In another context, he explained that the term “resort” was widely used in eighteenth-century Britain and France to mean “source of energy” (katsuryoku no gensen) in the modern sense.Footnote 51 Although the Japanese people had been pejoratively labeled “economic animals,” this was not necessarily a negative thing, as it implied their possession of “animal energy.”Footnote 52 His usage indicates that, for him, “energy” was a mixture of moral sincerity, an adventurous spirit, and an animal-like, rugged wildernessFootnote 53—the “heroic” character that Mill believed to be disappearing with civilizational development. However, the term still lacked sufficient descriptive clarity. Kōsaka himself was willing to admit its definitional ambiguity, explaining that “what gives power to civilization is inherently elusive.”Footnote 54
This ambiguity, however, was not entirely his own; it resulted from his inheritance of the Kyoto school’s argument. In the roundtable discussions examined in the next section, four Kyoto school scholars vigorously promoted moralische Energie. Kōsaka paraphrased this concept as “energy” (katsuryoku) and, with all its vagueness, placed it at the core of his own IR theory. Therefore tracing this conceptual lineage helps clarify how the Kyoto school’s ideals fed into a postwar international political theory.
The Kyoto school’s vision of international politics: pluralism and moralische Energie
Between 1941 and 1942, three roundtable discussions were organized by Chūō kōron, a renowned Japanese journal. The transcripts of these discussions were later published as a book entitled The Standpoint of World History and Japan. The participants included three philosophers—Kōyama Iwao, Nishitani Keiji, and Kōsaka Masaaki—alongside Suzuki Shigetaka, a researcher into Western history. Apart from Suzuki,Footnote 55 all participants were students of Nishida Kitarō. Despite Nishida’s absence, all four of them accepted his convoluted conception of a legitimate international order: the “particular worlds, each based on a historical foundation, unite to form a world-ly world.”Footnote 56 Although the terms “particular worlds” and “world-ly world” were conceptually complex, the underlying idea resonates with Amitav Acharya’s recent notion of a “multiplex world,” which he predicts will arrive following the decline of the liberal international order. He likens this projected order to a multiplex cinema where different films are shown in theatres of various sizes for a diverse range of audiences. In this model, the US-led liberal hegemonic order will be reduced to just one film of many being shown at the multiplex.Footnote 57 Kyoto school philosophers would argue that each theatre represents a particular world, while the overall multiplex constitutes the world-ly world.
This section focuses on the four Kyoto school debate participants and their worldview and the concept of moralische Energie behind it. The implications of their ideas for international politics were clear: the vindication of wider regionalism against Wilsonianism. Many political theorists on both the Axis and Allied sides argued for “Great Space” (or Großraum) against liberal internationalism. Having decided to support Nazism, Carl Schmitt articulated a theory of concrete order, thereby criticizing universalism—what he viewed as an Anglo-Saxon world order.Footnote 58 Both Walter Lippmann in the US and E. H. Carr in Britain dismissed universalism as an outdated ideal. Some Japanese readers found resonance in Carr’s Conditions of Peace, which they believed justified Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.Footnote 59 Carr’s own regionalism was not too far removed from an established British vision of international relations. Even Hobson, a fierce critic of imperialism, wrote that “Christendom thus laid out in a few great federal Empires, each with a retinue of uncivilised dependencies, seems to many the most legitimate development of present tendencies, and one which would offer the best hope of permanent peace on an assured basis of inter-Imperialism.”Footnote 60 The Kyoto school’s worldview was one strand within this broader anti-Wilsonian discourse; it did not constitute a “non-Western” theory separated from or merely opposed to Western IR theory.
Although this point has been raised several times, it is worth reiterating the intertwined relationship between “The Standpoint of World History and Japan” and the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Asia-Pacific War, known as the Greater East Asia War at the time. The four participants in the aforementioned roundtable discussions viewed the Wilsonian international order, represented by nation-states and the League of Nations, as mired in outmoded egalitarian formalism. They considered Japan’s gargantuan undertaking to radically reconfigure the status quo to be of “world-historical significance.” From their own perspectives, they sought to steer the prolonged, devastating war toward a better outcome. They maintained regular, secret contact with the Navy Ministry’s Research Section in an attempt to modify the ongoing conduct of the war, the colonial rules, and civilian and military administration. Their overarching goal was to find a rational justification for the war that could, at least in theory, persuade all countries involved rather than relying solely on dogmatic and mystical assertions.Footnote 61 Kōyama called it a “war of ideas”—a notion that Quentin Skinner later characterized as “rhetorical redescription” and Robert Cox simply dubbed “theory.”Footnote 62 In reality, however, their efforts ended up fueling the war as it unfolded. As Kōsaka Masataka put it (albeit in a different context), this was an instance of “ethically justifying unjust interests generat[ing] several times more harm than simply asserting those unjust interests.”Footnote 63 Indeed, Harry Harootunian described it as “an elaborate justification of the war in Hegelian philosophic language.”Footnote 64
One of the most important sources of inspiration for the roundtable discussions was German historian Leopold von Ranke, whose historiography introduced the Kyoto school to a fruitful philosophy of history and concept of world history. The Kyoto school considered Ranke to be working toward the identification of a dynamically unfolding orientation within specific historical developments, rejecting both Kantian atemporal formalism and Hegelian external determination of history’s purpose. The German historian called this orientation the “tendency,” likening it to a river continually shaping and reshaping its course under natural conditions; in this orientation, Nishida saw parallels with his own concept of “absolutely contradictory self-identity,”Footnote 65 in that Ranke’s “tendency” simultaneously captured both the “making” and the “being-made” aspects. Another impulse that Ranke brought to the Kyoto school was the notion of world history. While Nishitani greatly appreciated Ranke’s achievement in presenting each national history within the notional framework of an integrated world history, he nevertheless felt that Ranke’s “world” was still a European world rather than a truly global one.Footnote 66 The twentieth century witnessed the expansion of the world beyond the confines of Europe, marking a decisive departure from Eurocentric captivity. The historical “tendency” demonstrated the validity of deconstructing the Eurocentric worldview and pluralizing the world; thus a Rankean philosophy of history was conscripted to overcome the Rankean (European) world history.
The combination of recognizing the historical “tendency” and being able to realize the anticipated future constituted what the Kyoto school called moralische Energie, a term that was also derived from Ranke’s work. Toward the end of his short essay “Great Powers,” Ranke observed that beneath the turbulent world history lay an undefinable yet intuitive “spiritual, life-giving, creative force”—moralische Energie.Footnote 67 In “A Dialogue on Politics,” Ranke had his spokesman, “Friedrich,” confidently assert that if a state were to “rise to universal significance,” it would need moralische Energie to compete with other states.Footnote 68 Ranke’s utter conviction in this elusive concept was invoked by Nishida to dismiss Kantian moral formalism: “We ourselves have a unique duty in an irreplaceable particular time and place.” This energy enables states to fulfill each unique duty, or, in his words, “the individualizing self-forming power of the world.”Footnote 69
However, it was the four roundtable participants who displayed remarkable enthusiasm for the term and arguably pushed it beyond what Nishida had initially anticipated.Footnote 70 Toward the end of the first roundtable discussion, after Kōyama had introduced moralische Energie as the real cause of France’s defeat in 1940,Footnote 71 the other three began to instrumentalize the concept. Nishitani expressed admiration for it as “a very good term.”Footnote 72 Kōsaka Masaaki, who had already drawn extensively from Ranke’s account of this vibrant energy in The Historical World, declared that “the new world-historical center” should be “informed by principles that embody a new worldview and moral energy,” adding that the “world-historical necessity itself” obliged Japan to discover such a principle.Footnote 73 Conversely, adherents of the existing “Anglo-Saxon world order” were labeled “anti-ethical” and “anti-historical,” for they denied both the historical dynamic and moralische Energie.Footnote 74 Kōyama, in another context, described it as “a wild energy ready to deny and destroy.”Footnote 75 This is why, as Suzuki passionately put it, “December 8 [the date of the attack on Pearl Harbor] was the day when I think that we, as a nation, felt the power of the moralische Energy we possess in a most vigorous and moving way.”Footnote 76
Although their moralische Energy was inspired by Ranke, it was also drawn from East Asian intellectual traditions. Scholars of Japanese intellectual history such as Sakamoto Takao and Takayama Daiki have noted that their version of it also entailed elements of the concept of “vital energy” (qi), which originated in ancient Chinese philosophy and later spread to Japan.Footnote 77 Originally referring to cloud vapor, qi came to indicate a minute element constituting heaven and earth.Footnote 78 According to David Wong, “qi constitutes not merely the somatic, bodily dynamics, but also the motivating force of thoughts, emotions, and intentions of the individual.”Footnote 79 In late nineteenth-century Japan, particularly among the advocates of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, qi represented a transformative force capable of altering the status quo; galvanizing this dynamic power would enable people to overthrow domestic autocracy and repel foreign pressure.Footnote 80 Yet qi was perceived as anything but parochial. Nakae Chōmin, a leading Meiji-era democrat, equated Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s liberté morale with Mencius’ “vast and flowing energy (qi).”Footnote 81 One of his disciples, the prominent socialist Kōtoku Shūsui, implicitly believed that cultivating qi within each individual could shape global trends and catalyze revolution.Footnote 82
Alongside parliamentary debates and educational advancements, war was regarded a means of galvanizing this energy. In 1876, a newspaper editorial titled “War Is of Great Benefit to the Nation” asserted that war served to boost national qi.Footnote 83 When faced with the imminent Russo-Japanese War, prominent journalist Kuroiwa Ruikō abandoned his former anti-war stance, advocating participation in the conflict from the perspective of “energy-ism” (Seiryoku shugi/Energisum). “Energy,” he asserted, constituted everything in the world, from physical objects to human thought. Humans themselves were simply masses of energy, “constantly driven by the urge [qi] to act”; it was the inevitable collision of these energies that resulted in war and, in turn, made human progress possible.Footnote 84 Kuroiwa believed in the universality of his own “energy-ism,” which “arises evidently from the fundamental nature of matter.”Footnote 85 In the West, philosophers like Eduard von Hartmann, T. H. Green, and J. H. Muirhead had already articulated this idea; in the East, it manifested as the concept of “the unity of heaven and humanity.”Footnote 86 Thus, when the Kyoto school invoked “moral energy,” behind it stood a tradition—alongside Ranke—that underscored wartime qi or vital energy.
The “new world order” that Japan claimed to be creating through its moral energy was not a hegemonic empire dominated by Japan but rather a pluralistic world in which several Großräume (or geopolitically and culturally integrated areas) would coexist.Footnote 87 Ranke concluded his “Great Powers” with an ode to pluralism: “Out of separation and independent development will emerge true harmony.” Ranke, not unlike Michael Oakeshott, used the analogy of conversation to reject imperial domination, instead affirming the diversity of nations within a single world.Footnote 88 Kōyama dismissed the existing “universal world” as an overextended projection of the specifically European world. Only when Europe was reduced to its proper place as a particular world—and when the “universal world” was filled with a non-Eurocentric philosophy—would the universal be truly universal.Footnote 89 Japan’s wartime slogan—“Let every nation take its proper place”—paraphrased this idea.Footnote 90 As Christopher Goto-Jones noted, for these participants, “Japan, as the ultimate construction of the present, and thus the vanguard of the future, should strive to de-centre Europe.”Footnote 91 However, while this could be seen as a plea for a pluralistic world against Western hegemony, it was also a blatant justification to compel Asian countries to participate in Japan’s alleged world-historical mission—to accept Japanese “direction.” Regarding other nations like China resisting this imposed role, the roundtable participants blamed them for lacking moralische Energie and failing to grasp the movement of world history.Footnote 92
Although the roundtable participants advocated for the construction of a pluralistic world, believing it to be Japan’s epochal mission, they identified precedents for such political structures and ideals in the past. Minutes from the secret meetings revealed that they, along with other intellectuals around them, drew an analogy between the federal structure of the late Roman Empire and the conception of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. They went so far as to suggest that the federal system of the Soviet Union could serve as a model. At another meeting, they struggled to identify an overarching ideal that would underpin the distinctiveness of their co-prosperity sphere against the British Commonwealth.Footnote 93 However, as Sakamoto suggested, the US might have provoked the most ambivalent feelings.Footnote 94 Kōyama wrote elsewhere that, unlike European countries, the US possessed “a structure like a single world.”Footnote 95 Suzuki said that the US could be “better understood as a society rather than as a state,” cautioning against Japanese intellectuals looking down on it. Kōsaka retorted by explaining that he had “tried to be very careful not to do so,” as he liked “Americans such as [William] James very much.” Nevertheless, he agreed with Suzuki regarding the distinctiveness of US history, implying that it had not chosen the “imperialist path” prior to acquiring the Philippines. If this is the case, however, might this federal nation, rather than Japan, be better suited as the forerunner of a pluralistic world? This disturbing implication of the first roundtable, held roughly two weeks prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, was never fully explored. As we will see in the next section, it was not the participants who explored this potential, but rather an intellectual of the next generation: Kōsaka Masataka.
When Kōsaka Masaaki and three other participants were reshaping Ranke’s concepts of world history, pluralism, and moralische Energie to legitimize Japan’s supposedly epoch-making operation, his son Masataka had yet to even reach his teen years. Deeply shaken by Japan’s crushing defeat in the war, as discussed in the previous section, the boy resolved to study international politics, sometimes teasing his father for having defended a war he believed had been doomed from the outset.Footnote 96 Upon his father’s death, however, the international political theorist wrote in a letter to his younger brother that “The Standpoint of World History and Japan” was among his father’s greatest achievements, praising him for providing spiritual and moral support to young students departing for the front.Footnote 97 Toward the end of his life, he grew worried about the dissipation of Japan’s “moral power,” the fatal symptom of a declining nation.Footnote 98 Here, one can trace a conceptual genealogy from father to son—from moralische Energie to “energy.” Still, the generational shift posed a significant challenge: in postwar Japan, which embraced pacifism as defined by Article 9 of its Constitution, how could wartime moral energy be reconceived? The answer that this young international theorist proposed was “pluralism,” a theme already explored by his father and the three other roundtable participants.
“The moral equivalent of war”: the fate of moralische Energie in postwar Japan
On the opposite side of the Pacific, approximately one year before the wartime collaboration in which the four Kyoto school scholars instrumentalized Nishida’s philosophical vocabulary to construct the vision of the “multiplex world,” economists at the Council on Foreign Relations were discussing the scale of the American “Grand Area.” In the wake of Nazi Germany’s astonishing military successes, especially against France, they considered how large the US sphere of influence would need to be to counterbalance Germany’s bargaining power, assuming German hegemony over Europe and most of the Middle East and North Africa. Ultimately, they concluded that it would need to encompass the entire world outside the Soviet Union and the projected spheres of influence of Nazi Germany.Footnote 99 The “Grand Area” expanded further in the following year, and ceased to be a purely economic concept. As early as 2 September 1940, Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle wrote in his diary that, after the war, “the United States would emerge with an imperial power greater than the world had ever seen.”Footnote 100 The combination of its ambitious economic vision and military supremacy set postwar America fundamentally apart from earlier empires. As argued by John Ikenberry, America’s imperium was not exercised to create new exclusive territories or “particular worlds” but rather to destroy them and enforce the Westphalian system, thereby constructing a liberal international order.Footnote 101 In this way, the US became a “liberal Leviathan,”Footnote 102 or perhaps a “Wilsonian empire” that sought to dismantle traditional empires.
This “liberal Leviathan” began overhauling the Empire of Japan following its defeat in the Asia-Pacific War. “It was Japan,” Kenneth Pyle noted, where “this imperial reality was most clearly on display.”Footnote 103 Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP), was well aware of this, having received explicit instructions from the US: “Our relations with Japan do not rest on a contractual basis, but on an unconditional surrender … your authority is supreme.”Footnote 104 Adopting democratization and demilitarization as the US occupation policy, MacArthur and his staff embarked on far-reaching reforms, including constitutional, social, and economic transformations, sometimes with the cooperation of the Japanese government and sometimes despite its resistance. These measures went far beyond the institutional level. Those deemed to have promoted past “militarization” or to be likely to obstruct future “democratization” were purged from teaching positions, public offices, and private companies, with the number of people ultimately purged reaching approximately 220,000.Footnote 105 The occupation policy later shifted, however, seeking to turn Japan into a bulwark against communism, and prioritized economic recovery over “democratization,” resulting in the modification or effective withdrawal of many policies implemented early in the occupation. One of Japan’s major newspapers, the Yomiuri Shimbun, dubbed this shift the “reverse course,” introducing a new term to Japanese historiography.Footnote 106 The most visible manifestation of this turn was the lifting of purges. By the time the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect in 1952, most of those affected had already been allowed to return to public activities.Footnote 107
Amid this broad tide of reforms were the four members of the Kyoto school. Although they were purged after the war, they continued to write; once the ban was lifted, Nishitani returned to Kyoto University, while the other three secured new academic positions. Despite the rupture of total war defeat, their vision of overcoming the European world remained intact. They began citing Toynbee, who urged Western readers to accept the “dwarfing of Europe,”Footnote 108 as a convenient smokescreen for articulating their wartime ideal of a new world order. No wonder, then, that they did not abandon moralische Energie either. For instance, while Kōyama had drawn parallels between energy and raison d’état at the roundtables, Suzuki developed this argument further after the war, equating this energy with “national interest” (as one of the first translators of Morgenthau).Footnote 109 He claimed that Japan had chosen to wage war imprudently because the military had monopolized judgments of raison d’état, preventing political leaders from reasonably determining what constituted vital national interests.Footnote 110 This functioned as a form of self-justification; if a lack of moralische Energie—now interpreted as national interest—had culminated in defeat, then surely his own efforts to boost it must have been correct. Yet he could never find a way to restore that moral power amid postwar depletion, a “symptom of a nation’s decline, more pernicious than defeat itself.”Footnote 111
The Kyoto school members, Suzuki included, were thus confronted with William James’s question of the “moral equivalent of war.” James argued that successful pacifism must address how to realize the “military ideals of hardihood and discipline” in peacetime.Footnote 112 This essay served as a catalyst for Kōsaka Masaaki’s understanding of the core of the postwar problem: “Now that we have renounced war, what we need to argue is not how to rearm, but how to avoid the psychological corruption of society.”Footnote 113 Kōsaka sought to maintain “the higher ranges of men’s spiritual energy” (a phrase he borrowed from JamesFootnote 114) through education and pedagogy. During the war, he had argued that nations with moralische Energie could identify a morality within the historical tendency and develop it to transcend the status quo. He later replaced this philosophy of history with an education-oriented one, believing that the mission of pedagogy—as well as his personal mission—was to create individuals capable of grasping such a morality.Footnote 115 He became involved with educational policy and administration, serving as chairman of the council that issued the report on “desirable human beings.” Due to its content and his own past, however, the report faced significant criticism for its perceived oppressive and reactionary tenor.Footnote 116
His son Masataka was likewise convinced of the necessity of “men’s spiritual energy,” regarding its depletion as a crisis for “Japanese civilization.” According to him, his father’s achievements included not only inspiring students through wartime roundtable discussions but also submitting “the desirable human beings” report, which raised fundamental questions about how people ought to live.Footnote 117 The period in which his father contributed to the drafting of the report coincided with the publication of his first essay on Yoshida Shigeru discussed above. Near the end, he asked, almost in a soliloquy, “Do we not have a spiritual vacuum? Indeed, our postwar pursuit of new values has already faltered. In other words, defeat in total war is not easily overcome by diplomatic victory.”Footnote 118 As Pyle wrote, Kōsaka “admitted that the greatest challenge of the Yoshida strategy was maintaining national morale.”Footnote 119 Yoshida’s policies had made Japan wealthy and peaceful, ushering in a “boring era.” While peace itself was desirable, the loss of opportunities for people to exhibit wartime virtues—“loyalty, unity, perseverance, heroism, conscience, education, inventiveness, thrift, wealth, physical strength, and energy”—was, in his view, deeply troubling. He then referred to James’s “moral equivalents of war,” arguing that, without them, any serious consideration of “values more important than life” would be lost.Footnote 120 He clearly knew James well; when his father dictated the manuscript for The Philosophy of Pragmatism, Masataka (a high-school student at the time) transcribed it.Footnote 121
Faced with postwar pacifism, Masataka—in contrast to his father, who sought a “moral equivalent of war” in education and pedagogy—turned instead to the construction of a “pluralist” system that had been emphasized in the wartime roundtable discussions. In his view, “energy” was not sustained solely by individual effort; it was sustained by pluralistic power configurations and social structures. This systemic focus gave him a consistent perspective on politics and an acute sense of the confrontation between pluralism and monism that permeated his theory of politics and civilization. Addressing idealists who eschewed power politics and confrontation, he insisted, “let us acknowledge that it [confrontation] gives energy to people and brings good to society, and let us take some pleasure in it!”Footnote 122 The dialogue he envisioned with the “idealist” was thus based on what William Connolly called “agonistic respect.”Footnote 123 This conviction was underpinned by the fear of the “tyranny of the majority” in the tradition of Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville,Footnote 124 and by a distinctly Machiavellian celebration of conflict. “Read his Discorsi,” he said, “the theme of which was that Rome developed precisely because of the conflict between patricians and plebeians.”Footnote 125
The dialectic of pluralism and energy led him to both conservative and progressive arguments. On the one hand, it served as a warning against monistic political visions, ranging from socialism to the welfare state. Alongside Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, Kōsaka perceived the loathsome power that dominated the inner mind in the Houyhnhnms of Gulliver’s Travels. What made him shudder was their denial of power and conflict, which epitomized a form of totalitarian perfection in which neither the animal energy nor the transformative development it fostered could exist.Footnote 126 For similar reasons, he was a staunch opponent of the welfare state. The postwar quarter-century had seen “a decline in energy due to growing affluence and an excessive welfare state” in the developed world.Footnote 127 On the other hand, the same conviction enabled him to anticipate a progressive agenda on ecological issues. The spectacle of the technological civilization reshaping the Tasmanian environment, he suggested, demonstrated the implicit affinity between monistic politics and the systematic remaking of nature.Footnote 128 Kōsaka informed Prime Minister Satō Eisaku that the government must swiftly address the issue of pollution, and his advice contributed to the eventual establishment of the Environment Agency in 1971.Footnote 129 A desirable alternative to monistic political vision lay in the pluralistic “patchwork” politics implied by Bernard Crick’s argument in In Defense of Politics and Oakeshott’s notion of “practical knowledge.”Footnote 130
Belief in pluralism led Kōsaka to defend the balance of power as a bulwark against imperialism in international politics.Footnote 131 He insisted that the balance of power in modern Europe was not simply a de facto policy but a norm to be realized. The idea of a universal empire was anathema to Montesquieu, Hume, and Kant.Footnote 132 While an efficient empire could achieve peace, the balance of power would guarantee diversity: “Diversity was a source of energy, a source of creativity,” and “diversity, competition, energy, and freedom were inextricably linked.”Footnote 133 Recognition of pluralism was widespread during the age of classical diplomacy, and its subsequent decline undermined the ideal of the European concert. Even as nuclear weapons diminished traditional balance-of-power politics, a “world-state” remained undesirable. This stood in contrast to classical realists such as Niebuhr and Morgenthau, who recognized the moral value of a world-state while dismissing its immediate feasibility. After the Soviet Union completed its nuclear armament, however, they took this idea more seriously.Footnote 134 As Craig Campbell says, for them, “the prospect of thermonuclear war has caused the utopian and realistic approaches to merge.”Footnote 135 This line of reasoning formed the basis for Japanese “idealists” who advocated for Japan’s neutrality during the Cold War.Footnote 136 Yet Kōsaka remained unmoved. The idea of a world-state itself was morally unacceptable.
For the pluralist international order to be sustained, a country worthy of leadership must carefully oversee its preservation. In the post-World War II world, Kōsaka argued, the only plausible candidate was the US. Composed of “a great variety of races,” the US possessed the “intrinsic internationalism” that gave it “a more universal character than any other nation.” Multinational companies in the US, with their diverse workforces, offered a descriptive representation of the status of the US in world politics. As noted earlier, the Kyoto school may have held a somewhat similar view. If so, the pluralistic world that Japan had once sought to realize was, ironically enough, realized by the US. Kōsaka was particularly impressed by the American people’s inherent diversity and willingness to discuss conflicting opinions: “The most remarkable aspect of the process from the Gulf Crisis to the Gulf War was that people openly voiced questions and criticisms of President Bush’s policy.”Footnote 137 He approvingly cited Joseph S. Nye’s 1990 book Bound to Lead, which concluded that the US would “remain the leading power,” since it possessed superior “co-optive power.”Footnote 138 According to Nye, the prevailing view in Japan was that the country “should not aspire to replace the United States but should work closely with it as a ‘vice-president’ in the international system.”Footnote 139 Kōsaka likely found this persuasive. Thus, in his argument, Acharya’s multiplex worldview converged with Ikenberry’s US-led liberal international order. Using Kyoto school terminology, since the US itself was close to a “world-ly world,” other countries and civilizations (including Japan) could have stable “particular worlds.”
Although Japan developed economically within this international order, Kōsaka did not allow himself to indulge in optimistic predictions about his country. In 1970, he noted that “no country in history has ever had such enormous economic power and such limited military power as Japan.”Footnote 140 But soon he came to recognize historical precedents such as Venice, the Netherlands, and Carthage, drawing comparisons between Japan and these flourishing predecessors. This made a profound dilemma apparent: while maritime and commercial nations require adventurous energy, their very economic success causes them to lose it. Trade requires rationality, yet it also depends on passionate, adventurous individuals.Footnote 141 Britain’s grandeur arose from the combination of the “non-heroic” elite and the “heroic” adventurous merchant, epitomized by Queen Elizabeth and Sir Francis Drake; hence his remark that “Britain was a maritime nation, but Japan was an island nation.”Footnote 142 Therefore, if Japan were to lose its adventurous spirit through commerce and trade, it would face inevitable decline.
The vicissitudes of Venice and the Netherlands revealed the decisive importance of international circumstances and moral factors in the prosperity of maritime civilizations. A trading nation or civilization would inherently be vulnerable due to its inherent reliance on “others.” Its success depended not only on its own domestic politics but also on those of other states or empires. The fate of Venice, for example, was shaken by the internal politics of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 143 Preeminent trading nations could benefit other countries by pursuing “enlightened self-interest.” Nevertheless, they would invite contempt for profiting from an international order maintained by more powerful states. Japan was once dismissively dubbed an “economic animal,” in part due to its excessively egoistic conduct. Still, it confirmed the pattern that trading nations were frowned upon.Footnote 144 Yet trading nations, aware of this antipathy, have no choice but to continue their vocation—a self-deceptive practice that would give rise to domestic conflict and “a diminution of energy.” Reliance on the existing commercial order and the manipulation of various principles would eventually erode their identity, cause “moral confusion,” and, ultimately, debilitate their adventurous spirit.Footnote 145 Kōsaka approvingly quoted Plato’s warning about the moral corruption engendered by commercial activity.Footnote 146
Within this almost Pocockian dialectic of “virtue” and “commerce,”Footnote 147 Kōsaka sensed a threat to Japan’s moral and cultural achievement. As early as the 1970s, he admired the Netherlands and Venice because, despite their period of decline, they left great artists and universities behind. He feared that Japan would follow a different path, leaving no such moral or cultural legacies.Footnote 148 From the 1980s onward, this worry hardened into a conviction that eventually took the form of a melancholic prediction in his “A Memo of 2013.” In the future, he projected, Japan would embody the fully realized Saint-Simonian industrial civilization. Japanese people would pursue rational yet selfish interests, sidelining “dreams and spiritedness” and diminishing the public spirit in a way that stifles new and challenging undertakings. Simultaneously, a quarter of the world would be engulfed in civil wars, leading to the spread of protectionist policies and, in turn, the decline of Japanese civilization.Footnote 149 In this bleak vision, Japan’s cultural contribution to the world was missing. Toward the end of his life, he increasingly drew parallels between the fates of Carthage and Japan.Footnote 150 The lesson Kōsaka derived from the ancient trading nation was that “an entity like Carthage cannot attain true success, but fails miserably.”Footnote 151
The chance to resist this cold, harsh fate was slipping away, Kōsaka felt, amid the domestic discourse surrounding Japan’s participation in the 1991 Gulf War. Japan developed as a trading nation within the order established by the liberal Leviathan. He was convinced that American political culture underpinned this order and doubted that it could persist without the US. As long as Japan benefited from this hegemony, it had sufficient reason to support it. If ever there was an opportunity for Japan to transition from a country dependent on the liberal international order to a voluntary supporter—from merely enjoying a “particular world” to participating in building a “world-ly world”—it was at the moment of the Gulf War. But neither the government nor the public were seriously debating participation in the Gulf War, invoking pacifism as defined by the country’s Constitution.Footnote 152 Japan, in contrast to the US, did not determine its national policy through serious debate. In the 1960s, as noted earlier, he had once argued that “idealism” and pacifism brought pluralism and energy to public debate. Now, however, he claimed that they were weakening active debate and diminishing the nation’s “moral force.”Footnote 153 The war would not lead to a direct military crisis for Japan, but the stagnant debate revealed the country’s fatal flaw: “A country does not perish by losing a war, but by internal corruption … the richer the people, the deeper their corruption.”Footnote 154 This anger steeped in despair was likely prompted by his realization that he had failed to uphold the “moral equivalence of war.”
Conclusion
Around 1990, Shiono Nanami—a historical novelist whom Kōsaka greatly admired—had a private conversation with him about civilization.
SHIONO: What will Japan be like?
KŌSAKA: I hope it will be like the Byzantine Empire, as, at least, that country survived long enough.
SHIONO: But it didn’t create anything.
KŌSAKA: If we could live longer, we should bear with it. The empire even prevented the invasion of the barbarians.
SHIONO: The reason the East [i.e. the Eastern Roman Empire] could, and the West failed to, prevent the invasion was that the Byzantine defense system worked. Will Japan’s defense system, given the situation today, be able to work?
KŌSAKA: That, too, will improve with time.Footnote 155
This article has demonstrated that Kōsaka’s remark here was far from being a joke. He had a lifelong passion for civilizational inquiry that led him to view international politics through the lenses of “pluralism” and “energy,” ideas he shared with his father and the Kyoto school. As wartime and postwar contexts shifted, the political implications of their worldview reversed—from anti-Anglo-Saxon to pro-American liberal hegemony. Within this new world order, Japan faced a constant threat of declining energy posed by prosperity and the inescapable dependence inherent in maritime civilization. In this conversation with Shiono, he appeared to have abandoned hope for the kind of creativity that the Netherlands and Venice had once exhibited. Even worse, he was dissatisfied with the sluggish public discourse following the Gulf War. His anger saturated with despair stemmed from his professional conviction as an international political theorist, sparked by his youthful resolution: “I will study hard and make Japan truly strong and great in everything.” Thus Japan’s domestic response to the Gulf War represented, for him, a failure both as an international political scientist and as the culmination of a two-generation quest for the “moral equivalent of war.”
This two-generation intellectual thread offers a perspective that views the two opposing conceptions of global order—the liberal international order and the multiplex world order—as two variations within a single narrative. As already illustrated, the Kyoto school’s multiplex worldview and Kōsaka Masataka’s liberal international order stemmed from different interpretations of pluralism and energy across different contexts. This narrative suggests that both conceptions are rooted in a shared commitment to pluralism. Indeed, viewed from this angle, the ideological differences between Acharya and Ikenberry cease to appear as a simple opposition. Acharya sharply criticizes the liberal international order, arguing that, far from embodying such ideals, it was “created and dominated by the US and centered around Western interests, values, and institutions.”Footnote 156 Yet even as he criticizes America’s imposition of that order, he affirms its underlying ideals, noting that ASEAN’s founders were “recognizing the cultural diversity of their members and fully respecting their sovereignty as nation-states” and that a hierarchical order “is incompatible with Southeast Asia’s emphasis on sovereignty and equality.”Footnote 157 These principles, when expanded globally, closely resemble the premise of the liberal international order for which Ikenberry advocates. This is not to say that there is no conflict; many conceptions clash over the concept of “justice.” Rather, it is to say that, recalling how the father and son diverged from a shared foundation, it becomes possible to view these two seemingly incompatible visions as variations of a single concept, namely pluralism.
Moreover, this genealogy clarifies the contributions that intellectual history can make to ongoing debates about non-Western or global IR. Coinciding with intellectual historians’ efforts to globalize the history of ideas, IR theorists have called for the “globalization” and “pluralization” of the field,Footnote 158 often framing this trend through the metaphor of “dialogue.” Steve Smith concluded his International Studies Association presidential address after 9/11 by noting that international-studies researchers have been “virtually never listening out for, nor recognizing, voices or worlds other than our own until they occasionally force us into silence.”Footnote 159 Although this compelling metaphor effectively captures the aims of global IR, precisely because it is so appealing, its methodological implications often remain vague. As Yong-Soo Eun observes, “those who make a plea for active dialogue and engagement do not generally elaborate on how we could embark on this project.”Footnote 160 Taken together, the foregoing discussion suggests that a clear but often overlooked aspect of non-Western IR—and of “dialogue” itself—is that it is far from being a recent phenomenon. Attempts by the Kyoto school and Kōsaka Masataka constitute illustrative examples of such dialogue, as is likely true of modern non-Western IR more broadly. Non-Western IR thinkers engaged in transcultural dialogue long before its relevance was accentuated by scholars. Therefore tracing the attempts of past IR thinkers is a promising path toward figuring out how best to engage in dialogue. Intellectual history can play a crucial role in uncovering and articulating these accumulated practices.
The “dialogue” highlighted in this article showcases the risks of relying on an oversimplified Western/non-Western framework when attempting to broaden the scope of global IR. Like other dichotomies, this framework has a certain heuristic value; as Robbie Shilliam notes, its use is “perilous but unavoidable” (indeed, we have employed it here).Footnote 161 However, criticism of “Western-centrism” can itself slip into ethnocentrism or even the unintentional reinforcement of Western-centrism.Footnote 162 This article has shown that the categorical application of this dichotomy not only contradicts the ideal of global IR but even more directly distorts that which is typically considered non-Western IR. The Kyoto school and Kōsaka Masataka developed their ideas through sustained dialogue with Western theorists. The concept of moralische Energie originated with the German historian Ranke and the Chinese concept of qi. Kōsaka adopted this concept but integrated insights from figures like Niccolò Machiavelli and William James. When employing the label “non-Western,” it is therefore crucial not to obscure the Western interlocutors with whom “non-Western” thinkers engaged in dialogue.
Treating past IR thinkers as participants in the century-long dialogue between Western and non-Western IR (a dichotomy to which we must, once again, reluctantly return) or as a topos for said dialogue will likely encourage those who are not necessarily interested in non-Western IR or non-Western intellectual history per se to broaden their horizons. Citing examples like Thucydides and Immanuel Kant, Claire Vergerio emphasized the importance of how “great thinkers” have been received throughout the history of IR theory while lamenting that “the reception of great thinkers in IR still remains a vastly under-researched area in this discipline.”Footnote 163 Vergerio’s argument need not—and should not—be confined to the reception of Western thinkers within the subsequent Western tradition; indeed, she insisted on the need to trace receptions across “time and space.”Footnote 164 Non-Western IR theorists have inevitably engaged in dialogue with Western thinkers, creating a vibrant site in which these thinkers have been dynamically read and reinterpreted. The “pattern” and “phases” of Kant’s reception that Eric Isley described,Footnote 165 for example, may need to be examined in light of the fate of Perpetual Peace in Japan, where Kōsaka (the father) prepared one of its most accessible translations.Footnote 166 The Kyoto school and Kōsaka (the son) encountered Western thinkers such as Ranke, Toynbee, Carr, James, and Morgenthau. As long as the West maintained hegemonic dominance, such encounters were a global condition. Therefore the global reception history of “great thinkers” opens the way forward for new interpretive and dialogical communities centered on these thinkers, which encompass both Western and non-Western perspectives. This dynamic intellectual history would not only reveal how non-Western IR theorists have engaged in dialogue, but also shed light on new aspects of Western “great thinkers” that have previously been overlooked.
Acknowledgment
We are very grateful to the Library of Shizuoka University of Art and Culture for granting permission to use the Kōsaka Masataka Collection (bunko). We are also indebted to the Rockefeller Archive Center for providing access to their materials. We would like to thank Yusuke Aikawa, Tomohito Baji, Yoshi Kamimura, Hannah Dongsun Lee, Ryoya Mizuno, and Yusuke Tega for their invaluable comments on the earlier drafts of this article.
Open access
