- 著者
-
水田 洋
- 出版者
- The Japanese Society for the History of Economic Thought
- 雑誌
- 経済学史学会年報 (ISSN:04534786)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.38, no.38, pp.83-90, 2000 (Released:2010-08-05)
I was born in the middle-class area in Tokyo in 1919 and educated there until the Pacific war broke out in December 1941, when our university course was curtailed by three months and students were driven into the military service, from which I had a narrow escape owing to a physical condition. Higher education during that period was fairly liberal. In my case, the seminar text-books were by Hobbes, Locke, and Smith. As a radical liberal student I could not help resisting the semi-feudal and militarist structure of Japanese society and the policy to strengthen it. The heyday of Japanese Marxism, when it was said that all the clever students would become Marxists, seemed to have disappeared under the fierce suppression. However, at the same time it seemed to me that the Marxist criticism of Japanese society was the most convincing one. I started studying the main streams of social thought of the modern ages to locate Marx in them. Reading Marx in the light shed by the modern thinkers of the West, and reading those modern thinkers in the light shed by Marx, I have been developing fresh pictures of them all.I started translating Hobbes' Leviathan when I was taken a prisoner of war in 1945-6. It took more than forty years to complete. My first book was a history of social thought from Machiavelli to Hobbes. I translated Smith's Lectures on Jusrisprudence, Theory of Moral Sentiments, and The Wealth of Nations before concentrating myself on the study of Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment. My catalogue of Adam Smith's Library on which I started working when I was a British Council Scholar in 1954-6 will be published shortly.Although I was an initial member of the Society for the History of Economic Thought, I felt it necessary to establish a new society for the history of social thought distinct especially from the history of economic doctrine. The society was established in 1976.