Discussing the issues of “Asia,” Takeuchi Yoshimi’s discourse of “Overcoming Modernity” has received broad attention among the international community of scholars. Commentators try to identify the ideological elements of this discourse that, as they hope, could help to solve post-modern problems. After analysing Takeuchi’s understanding of the war and its context, this paper shows that his discourse of “overcoming modernity” has an anti-historical tendency, which stems from the ideological ambiguity of his attitude towards the question of who was responsible for (...) the war. (shrink)

Ten years ago, conceptual history was still relatively unknown in Chinese academic circles. But within just a single decade, it has already emerged as a very popular field among scholars. When broaching conceptual history, the first thing to make clear is that, whether we’re speaking of a research field or a methodology, this is a scholarly tradition rooted in Germany. Hence, if we are to apply conceptual historical methods to China and carry out transcultural conceptual historical research here, we must (...) understand the basic connotations of conceptual history. Reinhart Koselleck’s introduction to 8 volumes of Basic Concepts of History: An Historical Lexicon of Political and Social Terms in Germany is an essential text in conceptual history. In this work, Koselleck proposes three These for conceptual history: concepts are historical, criteria for the “four changes” of basic historical concepts, and the “saddle period.”. (shrink)

If we do not shrink from making rough generalizations and adopt a broad, conventional approach, then what we call modernity refers to the process whereby a state of heterogeneity progresses toward homogeneity in time, space, human collectives, social order, and other areas. In his book The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg discusses a late-16th century incident of heterodoxy that cannot be classified into previously existing standard categories. As new knowledge was disseminated thanks to the invention of the Gutenberg printing (...) press, old and new knowledge came into conflict in the mind of a heterodox figure by the name of Menocchio. He attacked the church, saying that it was more important to love one’s neighbor than to love God. Through these small, humble manifestations of change, Ginzburg was able to reveal the juncture when European modern knowledge first emerged from a muddled, undifferentiated state into one of clarity, whereby over the course of about a century of fermentation, its contours eventually became clearly evident around the year 1800. This process has been termed by the pioneer of conceptual history Otto Brunner as the “threshold era”, and by Reinhart Koselleck as the beginning of the “saddle era”. (shrink)