Politics
1835 to 1901, Nakatsu and Tokyo, Japan
Equality by birth, independence of mind, and practical learning - the ideas with which Fukuzawa taught a nation to remake itself, and the civilization-ladder that darkened into ‘leaving Asia.’
Start learning Fukuzawa →The opening declaration of An Encouragement of Learning - that by birth all people are equal, since Heaven sets no one above or below anyone else - and Fukuzawa’s twist: that the vast real inequalities among people spri…
Fukuzawa’s central ideal of dokuritsu jison - independence and self-respect - and his famous thesis that a nation can be independent only when its individual citizens are: personal self-reliance as the foundation of nat…
Fukuzawa’s campaign for jitsugaku - practical, empirical learning close to the business of life - and against the sterile Confucian textualism that prized the memorizing of ancient classics over useful knowledge of the…
Fukuzawa’s most sustained theoretical work, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1875): civilization as the advance of a whole people’s knowledge and virtue, its stages from savage to half-civilized to civilized, and…
The hardest chapter in Fukuzawa’s thought: the 1885 editorial Datsu-A Ron (‘On Leaving Asia’), in which he urged Japan to abandon its ‘backward’ Asian neighbours and cast its lot with the civilized West - taught here ho…
More in Politics
John LockeThomas HobbesJean Jacques RousseauJohn Stuart MillNiccolo MachiavelliCiceroMahatma GandhiSun Tzuepoché — a humanities education that remembers you.