Kaiho Seiry (1755-1817) is probably the first Japanese thinker to proclaim the contractual nature of human relationships. I examine in this paper the view of human beings that led him to this conclusion. Giving up previous definitions of humans, Seiry focuses on the faculty of practical reason. While this leads him to recognize a hierarchy of humans, some having more humanity than others, it also allows him to develop the most modern understanding of social relationship available in his time. (...) His radical reinterpretation of what it is to be a human being is all the more remarkable because it was done with the concepts and ideas provided by the Chinese Classics. Establishing new connections, giving new life to ideas that were never exploited, Seiry showed it was possible to make sense of modernity without using foreign concepts. (shrink)

Une modernité indigène: Ruptures et innovations dans les théories politiques japonaise du xviiie siècle, by Olivier Ansart, is a thoughtful, elegantly written book that offers valuable insights into Japanese political thought in an era that culminated in the Meiji Restoration. Despite the specific characteristics of the rigid centralized feudal structure of Tokugawa society, Ansart argues, political ideas generally associated with the advent of “modernity” in the West were generated indigenously in a context in which knowledge of the West was limited (...) primarily to science and technology.The main focus of the book is the thought of Kaiho Seiryō.1 Seiryō was inspired by two schools of thought that... (shrink)