CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Ikegami, Kosuke |
|---|---|
| Title | Between Heaven and the People: The Conceptual History of Koron |
| Summary | Article one of the Charter Oath reads ‘deliberative assemblies shall be widely established and all matters decided by kōron’. The term, kōron, which appears in the oath has played an important role in the political and intellectual history of Japan. The purpose of this paper is to trace a trajectory of the concept of kōron, which cannot be simply reduced to words such as public opinion or public discussion. For this purpose, I deploy German conceptual history methodologically as well as the history of ideas in Japan. This research aims to shed light on the semantic plurality within this concept, through which it provides a new insight into studies in modern Japanese political and intellectual history. Through this research, it turned out that the concept of kōron had undergone several semantic transformations: Kōron was originally conceptualised as a Confucian normative discourse and then became a political ideology. Later, it was sometimes understood as public opinion and other times as a just opinion against public opinion. Kōron was sometimes used to express one’s moral belief and other times deployed as a rationale to gather people’s voices, and still at other times as a pretext to attack one’s enemies. Though kōron certainly has an undemocratic aspect, the possibility that kōron coincides with democracy, that the philosophy of Yokoi Shōnan and Nakae Chōmin partly unveiled, subsists in the plurality of its conceptualisation. |
| Supervisor | Seaton, Philip; Riedl, Matthias |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/ikegami_kosuke.pdf |
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