ABSTRACT
Debates on ‘mass society’ can generally be found in Western industrialised countries from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s. However, Japanese debates in the 1950s had a unique character. The reason lies in the fact that since the 1920s Marxism had been overwhelmingly influential in modern Japanese social sciences. This does not mean that all Japanese social scientists were Marxists, but that, between the pre-war era and around the time of the 1960s, both Marxists and non-Marxists in Japan tended to share a basic understanding that social science is Marxism, or that Marxism had established a genuine social science. The influence of Marxism over Japanese social sciences weakened at the end of the 1960s and declined after the 1980s. But during the 1950s, the academic atmosphere was dominated by the feeling that social scientists could not say anything without Marxism. In 1956 and 1957 a remarkable ‘Debate on Mass Society’ took place between theorists of mass society and Marxists in Japan (Yamada, 2006: ch. 5). The central figure of the debate was Keiichi Matsushita (1928-), a Japanese political theorist. There are several reasons why Matsushita’s theory of mass society is worth recovering for the English-speaking world today. First, his theory was of a highly Marxian kind. While he himself was not a Marxist and was very critical of Stalinist Marxism, he regarded theories originating with Marx and Lenin as social theories of industrial society, and he repeatedly endorsed their significance in theorising about contemporary society in the twentieth century. While many Western theorists of mass society tended to describe it as an amorphous ‘classless society’ (Arendt, 1951; Lederer, 1940; Neumann, 1942; cf. Kornhauser, 1959) Matsushita did not deny the existence of capitalistic class relationships but rather built Marxian class theory into his theory of mass society. His theory of mass society is unique, and it is difficult to claim that even Japanese political and social theorists have really understood it. Second, Matsushita’s theoretical insight into the relation between socialism and democracy is significant. He advocated a kind of socialism that could cope with the reality of mass society, neither a form of communism that totally denied democracy, nor a social democracy that compromised with capitalism. For him, contemporary society faced a ‘double alienation’: ‘capitalistic alienation’ and ‘alienation in mass society’. The role of both political theorists and socialists
was to find a way to overcome this double alienation. His ideas in the 1950s seem to run parallel with later arguments of the European Left for radical democracy during the 1980s and 1990s.2 Matsushita is a good example of a Japanese political scientist who developed an original and distinctive political and democratic theory. The purpose of this chapter is to examine his theory of mass society in order to further Englishlanguage discussion of Japanese debates on democracy and to provide common ground for comparative studies of Western and Japanese theorisations of democracy and civil society.
