Abstract
Like all important histories of political ideas, Jolyon Baraka Thomas’s new book Faking Liberties reveals the dynamic through which concepts commonly held as self-evident emerged and solidified as common sense. Here the focus is on the idea of religious freedom, which the author argues has a history far more complicated than the oft-told story of the US bestowing the universal ideal to its vanquished foe, which it freshly liberated from State Shintō. Through a close examination of a wide range of sources, Thomas establishes three key facts upending this narrative. First, the guarantee of religious freedom in the Meiji Constitution was far from mere rhetoric, but a hotly contested legal issue with which Japanese bureaucrats and constitutional scholars engaged rigorously and in good faith. Second, in the same way that figures in Japan grappled with religious freedom under the Meiji Constitution, it was far from a settled concept in the...
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