A World Made Safe for Differences: Ruth Benedict's "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"

Abstract

LIBERALISM HAS ALWAYS PRIDED ITSELF ON ITS ACCEPTANCE OF DIVERsity. At no time was this value more central to American liberalism than during the cold war era.1 The racial and totalitarian ideologies that seemed to precipitate World War II brought forth postwar vision of what the anthropologist Ruth Benedict called a world made safe for differences, in which cultural freedom would serve as the basis for world peace.2 Throughout the cold war era, liberal policy makers, no less than their critics, decried the gap between the theory and the practice of tolerance, but few critically analyzed the idea of cultural tolerance itself; historical treatments of tolerance have suffered from the same deficiency. In this essay, I would like to shift the historical debate over tolerance from the social to the intellectual level through close reading of one of the earliest articulations of the postwar doctrine of tolerance, Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. A study of Japanese culture intended to bring intercultural understanding to bear on the reconstruction of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the