The H-Word by Perry Anderson

Author:Perry Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

II

The enthronement of the School of Principles as a doctrine of state did not reduce Confucian culture in Ming-Qing China to Zhu Xi’s system. Literature could thrive, surviving his contempt for it, alternative philosophical outlooks find expression, and new disciplines—essentially a more historically-minded philology—emerge. But political thought was sterilised, ideological conformity to a Neo-Confucian order of static moralistic abstraction re-enforced by heightened repression and censorship with the advent of the Manchu.

In Japan of the same period, Confucian scholarship took altogether another direction. There, since the twelfth century, warriors rather than officials had ruled, in a feudal society with a figurehead imperial line, but no centralised bureaucratic state, where supreme political power was held by a succession of shoguns, the highest warlords in the land. After 150 years of internecine strife, the Tokugawa Shogunate had by the early seventeenth century pacified the country and established a stable baku-han regime, in which Confucian ideas could for the first time take significant native root. The setting in which they did so differed radically, however, from that in China. There was no examination system, no ancestor-worship, no Confucian temples. Traditionally, legitimation of power was supplied by Buddhism, far more entrenched than in China, or Shintoism. Confucian intellectuals—typically déclassés doctors, monks or samurai—thus started from marginal positions, and could also become vulnerable to charges of an unpatriotic sinocentrism. Still, Chinese culture had always enjoyed high prestige in Japan, and they could draw on a body of learning that was larger and more sophisticated than any rival in bidding for influence with the Bakufu, which gradually—by the time of the fourth or fifth Tokugawa shogun—integrated them into its rule, if never according them the status their Chinese counterparts held. At the same time, because there was no bureaucratic centralisation of power in Japan, they were also structurally in many ways freer than the Chinese literati. For the Bakufu was not only flanked by an imperial court that, though practically impotent, retained symbolical aura, but also directly controlled no more than a third of the country, the rest forming fiefs of daimyō, each with their own revenues and warriors, owing allegiance to, but running their domains independently of, the shogun. In due course, moreover, the feudal order in Japan permitted a much more dynamic merchant culture in Edo and Osaka than the Qing autocracy allowed in the cities of China. In this more variegated landscape, the space for independent thought was significantly greater.

In these conditions, Confucians were faced with political questions for which their sources in China offered little obvious guidance. Unity of the realm was an absolute value in the classical Chinese canon, which from Qin times onwards had taken practical shape in a centralised imperial state. But if division of the realm could never be accepted, overthrow of a dynasty could. The mandate of heaven could be forfeited. It was a lease, not an irrevocable title to power, transferrable after the fact to a successful rebellion. The configuration in Japan was just the opposite. Sovereignty

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