A Paragon of the Intellectual:The Case of Masao Maruyama

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the role of intellectuals as shown in the political thought of Masao Maruyama. Maruyama has persistently criticized Japan’s ultra-nationalism, which contributed to the rise of World War II. Although he did not write on the notion and role of the intellectuals on their own, he has implicitly referred to them in an effort to analyze the thoughts of Japanese people in the aftermath of World War II. In short, for Maruyama, the primary task of the intellectuals is to deliver a critical voice to challenge the unjustified realities. In the aftermath of World War II in Japan, ultra-nationalism was closely related to the recognition of the emperor’s authority that largely comes from the Confucian ideology; thus, no clear-cut distinction existed between the private interests and public interests. Hence, Maruyama contends that the logic of Japanese ultra-nationalism is based entirely on the collective ethos in emphasizing the national interests, which are always identified with the private interests. In addition, Maruyama pinpoints the elements of both the absence of the private sphere and the denial of individuals’ moral autonomy, which led to the rise of fascism in Japan. In opposition to the main ethos of wartime ultra-nationalism in Japan, Maruyama intends to formulate an ethos for democratic postwar nationalism embedded primarily in the Western type of autonomous individuals. In this sense, Maruyama obviously presents the liberalist view, which was exhaustively deficient at that time in Japan because Japan did not fully accomplish the Western type of liberalism. In so doing, he tries to show that autonomous subjects could protect humanity from the irrational force of ultra-nationalism. Therefore, this paper considers the role of the intellectuals by examining Maruyama’s critical analysis with respect to the unjustified ultra-nationalism during the totalitarian regime underpinned by the emperor system in Japan.