ABSTRACT
The notions of peace and democracy rang out as a leitmotif in the Japanese intellectual discourse after the defeat, up to the 1960s. Certainly, democracy was first of all accompanied by a ‘passive’ pacifism, consisting of a simple anti-war sentiment of which it was the reward. But once Japan regained independence, in the early 1950s, and then in the middle of the Cold War, many Japanese intellectuals saw in pacifism the chance to base postwar democracy actively in universal values. We shall concentrate on the positions taken by the philosopher Maruyama Masao (1914–1996), who was not only the dominant figure in this debate, but was able to bring together the often contradictory positions defended by the other participants, even reflecting upon them after the divisions had been established, and later himself moving to active involvement in the riots that took place over revision of the Security Treaty with the United States in 1960. In all this – and this is what we should like to show – this author only drew logical conclusions from earlier reflections published in the book that remains his principal truly academic work, his History of Japanese Political Thought, 1 in which he believed he had discovered in his country the sprouts of a historical consciousness, in itself a precursor to thought about modernity.
