Description
Building on recent scholarship which has found Japanese conservatism’s shift to the right, this paper traces the theoretical foundations of contemporary conservative politics. As an intellectual force, a radical conservatism emerged in Japan around the late Cold-War period and has developed through the subsequent decades. The paper’s aims are two-fold: first, it develops the concept of radical conservatism as an ideological thread in the political right. Second, it explores the content of this ideology in contemporary Japan. Bringing together key thinkers of the contemporary Japanese political Right such as Keishi Saeki and the late Susumu Nishibe among others, this paper argues that radical conservative thought developed as critique of liberal democracy nationally and the liberal democratic order internationally. This critique is built through the socio-political tradition of “mass society” which first emerged in European political thought of the 1930s. According to theories of mass society, modernity – which is understood as capitalism, democracy, and liberalism – has degraded the social and moral values of traditional societies. They key novelty in the contemporary development in the context of Japan has been the ways in which this understanding of ‘mass society’ has been mobilized to a critique of the international order, influencing conservative world view and foreign policy. In short, the paper proposes that by taking radical conservatism as a serious ideological tradition, we can understand the theoretical foundations of conservatism’s turn to the right in Japan within the context of the rise of the New Right as a political force in recent years.
