Fukuzawa Yukichi and Miyazaki Tōten: A Double Portrait in Black and White of an Odd Couple in the Age of Globalizing Capitalism

Abstract

AbstractIn this article I attempt to illuminate the nexus between the biographical conception of the self, historical consciousness, and capitalism. The means by which I accomplish this enterprise is a comparison of the autobiographies of two Japanese intellectuals, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) and Miyazaki Tōten (1871–1922). In light of this comparison, and encouraged by a remark in Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination about the opposition and complicity of rationalist and romantic attitudes toward the world and the self, I demonstrate that Fukuzawa and Miyazaki, as model representatives of these antagonistic attitudes, are as different as black and white but that their antagonism is possible and becomes thinkable only within the horizon of a single, capitalist modernity. This endeavor also entails a critique of conservative and reactionary notions of history and tradition, as well as postcolonialist and postmodern approaches to the problem of modernity.