Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology Hardcover - 2002

When blues legend Howlin' Wolf sings, "Nature cause me to mess up my life," we know how he feels.

"Reconfiguring Nature is a stimulating, original, and timely contribution to contemporary attempts to give modern political thought a global and hybrid genealogy. Thomas's analysis of Japanese ideas of 'nature' helps to raise some fundamental questions about assumptions made in Euro-American political philosophy. Comparativist and specialized at the same time, this book is extremely sensitive to the complex processes through which ideas cross boundaries in time and space."--Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

"Reconfiguring Modernity treats the linked transformations in conceptions of nature, the body, and society in Japan from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s: from a static and hierarchical unity of cosmos and society, to a competitive and evolutionary "naturalized" society, and then again to a 'family state' and projected unitary culture as the harmonious counterpart, of a benevolent natural world. To this compellingly interesting theme, Julia Thomas brings an impressive range of reading and considerable literary skill. Her argument is frequently original and always discerning. In highlighting the impact and permutations of evolutionary thinking, it is especially important contribution to Meiji intellectual history, which has not been given sustained attention for quite some time in English-language scholarship."--Andrew Barshay, author of State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan