Abstract
Seken is an indigenous and a commonly used Japanese word. It expresses a type of lifeworld, like air, that exists between individual and society, and regulates the behaviours of almost all Japanese people. Seken, a sort of invisible force which restricts people’s individual freedom, underlies the well-ordered Japanese society that was allegedly preserved even in the case of the Great East Japan Earthquake that occurred on 11 March 2011. In search of a new approach to analysing the distinctiveness of Japanese society, some scholars have focused on this indigenous term at the exclusion of western-originated, yet widely used terms such as civil society, public sphere and others.1
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Notes
The late Kinya Abe, a leading Japanese historian, was its key advocate. See Kinya Abe, Seken towa nanika (What is Seken?) (Tokyo: Koudansha, 1995).
A. S. Tumanova (ed.) Samoorganizatsiia rossiiskoi obshchestvennosti v poslednei treti XVIII-nachale XX v. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2011), p. 12
Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism, and Civil Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 254.
V. Ia. Grosul, Russkoe obshchestvo XVIII–XIX vekov: Traditsii i novatsii (Moscow: Nauka, 2003), pp. 6, 492.
Vadim Volkov, ‘Obshchestvennost’: Russia’s Lost Concept of Civil Society’, in Norbert Götz and Jörg Hackmann (eds) Civil Society in the Baltic Sea Region (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2003), p. 67.
Ilya V. Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia: Rural Professionals and Self-Organization, 1905–30 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 23.
B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v.): genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem’i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravovogo gosudarstva, Tom 2 (St. Petersburg: Dmitorii Bulanin, 1999), p. 110.
Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow and James L. West (eds) Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). In particular, Gregory L. Freeze noted the ‘obshchestvennost’—the emerging social identity of the educated, propertied middle strata in the city’. See ‘“Going to the Intelligentsia”: The Church and its Urban Mission in Post-Reform Russia’, in Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow and James L. West (eds), Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 225.
V. A. Maklakov, Vlast’ i obshchestvennost’ na zakate staroi Rossii (Vospominaniia), prilozhenie k ‘Illiustrirovannoi Rossii’ (1936), pp. 316, 430, 432, 440.
V. I. Gurko, Cherty i siluety proshlogo: pravitel’stvo i obshchestvennost’ v tsarstvovanie Nikolaia II v izobrazhenii sovremennika (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2000).
Samuel D. Kassow, ‘Russia’s Unrealized Civil Society’, in Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow and James L. West (eds) Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 367. Based on an understanding of obshchestvennost’ broadly similar to Kassow’s, Michael Hickey, who analysed the liberals’ discourse and their appeal to obshchestvennost’ in the political process of Spring 1917, immediately after the February Revolution, in Smolensk, argues, ‘liberal appeals to obshchestvennost’ quickly faded’, because of ‘pervasive class discourses and class-based identities’.
See Michael C. Hickey, ‘Discourses of Public Identity and Liberalism in the February Revolution: Somlensk, Spring 1917’ The Russian Review, Vol. 55, No. 4, 1996, p. 637.
M. Ia. Markovich, ‘Sovetskaia obshchestvennost’’, in M. S. Epshtein (ed.) Za novyi byt: posobie dlia gorodskikh klubov (Moscow, 1925), pp. 44–45.
For a representative work, see I. N. Il’ina, Obshchestvennye organizatsii Rossii v 1920-e gody (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2000).
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 139–140, 168–169.
Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 91, 93–94.
Michael David-Fox, ‘Review of Irina Nikolaevna Il’ina, Obshchestvennye organizatsii Rossii v 1920-e gody (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2000)’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2002, pp. 173, 177–178, 180–181.
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© 2015 Yasuhiro Matsui
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Matsui, Y. (2015). Introduction. In: Matsui, Y. (eds) Obshchestvennost’ and Civic Agency in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137547231_1
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