著者

西村 邦行

出版者

一般財団法人 日本国際政治学会

雑誌

国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2014, no.175, pp.175_41-175_55, 2014

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Scholars of international studies in Japan have repeatedly reflected on their excessive susceptibility to the Western academia; they have rigorously "imported" theories from America and Britain whereas they have failed to develop their own. However, few researchers have exemplified how this "importation" has actually been played out. Given that the Japanese recipients of Western theories have not shared academic and other contexts with their original bearers, it is possible that the "importation" have led to idiosyncratic interpretations of these theories.<br>This article examines in which context and in what way Japanese scholars in the middle-war and the early post-war periods read the works of E. H. Carr, the oft-claimed pioneer of Western international relations theory. In the Anglophone international studies academia, scholars have usually labeled Carr realist who had rejected interwar liberal internationalism. His first readers in Japan did not embrace such view. They, in fact, did not read Carr exclusively as international theorist. Carr, for early Japanese scholars, was an empiricist social thinker who attempted to transcend the modern ways of (both domestic and international) politics.<br>Among Carr's writings, the one that first won the heart of Japanese scholars was not<i> The Twenty Years' Crisis</i>, the now acclaimed classic of international relations theory, but <i>Conditions of Peace</i>, its more utopian-oriented sequel. They, in addition, virtually ignored the book's second part, in which Carr provided his prescriptions for the new world order; they rather focused on the first part, in which he discussed the limits of modern political thought. Finishing <i>Conditions of Peace</i>, furthermore, they moved on to <i>The Soviet Impact on the Western World</i>, yet another book on the crisis of the modern European political system. Only after this series of reception, <i>The Twenty Years' Crisis</i> caught a spotlight. As a result, Japanese scholars read the book not so much as an advocacy of power politics as a stepping stone for the future governance of the still antagonistic relationship among states.<br>Thusly, early Japanese recipients of Carr read his works against the backdrop of their own concern about the deadlock of modernity. This insight provides us an alternative way to approaching the history of Japanese international studies.