II. THE SHORT HISTORY OF THE RECEPTION OF ADAM SMITH IN JAPAN

Before turning to a detailed analysis of Mizuta and Tanaka, it is necessary to outline the broader intellectual background in which their ideas emerged.

According to Kazuo Okouchi and Kyoji Tazoe (Reference Okouchi and Tazoe1965), the reception of Adam Smith in Japan can be divided into four stages. The first stage, extending from the years immediately preceding the Meiji Restoration to the late Meiji period (around 1907), was characterized primarily by the introduction and translation of Smith’s ideas. The second stage, from 1909 to 1923, marked the beginning of an academic reception, as economists and social scientists started to study Smith systematically within university settings. The third stage, from 1923 to 1940, saw the institutionalization of Smith studies and the establishment of specialized research, accompanied by closer textual and historical analysis. The fourth stage, from 1940 to 1952, was one of further elaboration and consolidation, during which Smith’s scholarship became more professionalized despite the intellectual constraints of wartime and early postwar conditions. During this period, Zenya Takashima (1904–1990),Footnote ⁵ Mizuta’s supervisor, elaborated the liberalist interpretation of Smith, while the debate on capitalism in Japan provided Mizuta with the background understanding of the conditions of capitalism in that country. This line of liberalist understanding of Japanese society to Mizuta was also the context of Tanaka’s studies.

Before the studies of Mizuta, the reception of Smith in Japan had already reflected broader debates about the meaning of economic freedom, the role of the state, and the institutional foundations of capitalism.

About the first period of the reception of Smith’s ideas, although the Wealth of Nations was brought into Japan before the Meiji Restoration (Sugihara Reference Sugihara1980, p. 7), it was after that era in the late 1860s that liberal economic thought—including Smith’s doctrine of free trade and limited government—was introduced to Japan alongside political liberalism, understood as individual freedom. It was Yukichi Fukuzawa who first made Smith’s name widely known among Japanese intellectuals. Through both his publications and his educational activities, Fukuzawa introduced political economy as an essential body of knowledge for national development and individual independence. In addition to his writings, he encouraged students at the school he founded, Keio Gijuku, to recognize the importance of economics as a practical and moral science necessary for participation in a modern commercial society (Sugihara Reference Sugihara1980, p. 9).

For Fukuzawa, it was Smith who established economics as independent of the rulers. He wrote:

Before the Meiji Restoration, the warrior class tried to direct farmers, merchants, and manufactures under their control, and the latter fell short of the spirit of independence, the shortage that Fukuzawa wanted to change (Nohara Reference Nohara2023).

Furthermore, during this period, Ukichi Taguchi, one of the most popular liberalists in the Meiji era, advocated free trade against protectionism from the perspective of Smithian economic theory. He supervised the first translation of the Wealth of Nations by Eisaku Ishikawa and Shosaku Saga (1882–1888). However, although many Japanese people in this era studied Smith based on textbooks of political economy, especially Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s Political Economy for Beginners (1870, fifth edition), they had not yet researched Smith directly based on his works (Sugihara Reference Sugihara1980, p. 10).

By the 1880s, Japanese economists increasingly turned toward German economic thought—particularly the Historical School—and began to criticize Smith’s perceived neglect of the state’s role in managing economic affairs. This critique marked the beginning of a broader retreat from political liberalism in the late Meiji period.Footnote ⁶ German-influenced economists, concerned with emerging social issues like poverty and labor conditions, became critical of unrestricted markets. Their concerns led to the formation of the Japanese Association for Social Policy Studies in 1896, which was reorganized in 1907, and contributed to a decline in support for laissez-faire economics (Sumiya Reference Sumiya1967, pp. 151–184).

During this crisis of Smith’s political economy, the second stage of Smith’s scholarship began, in which there were more authentic studies of his work. Against this crisis of Smith’s political economy, some refuted the view of Smith as an ideologue of laissez-faire. Tokuzo Fukuda, the most influential introducer of Western economics into Japan, wrote “Kosei Keizaigaku no toshi toshiteno Adam Smith” (Adam Smith as a fighter for welfare economics) in 1923. He then insisted that Smith’s economic mechanism, based on individuals’ self-interested activities, explained only a part of his thought; Smith also explicated ethics to counteract self-interest. To harmonize these two, Smith admitted the role of a state for people’s welfare (Fukuda Reference Fukuda1923, pp. 391, 415–416).

Nonetheless, especially during the 1920s and the early 1930s, a great number of students, scholars, and intellectuals were inspired by Marxism, and the third stage of Smith scholarship thus began. On the one hand, Marxist scholarship on Smith developed especially in terms of his labor theory of value (Okouchi and Tazoe Reference Okouchi and Tazoe1965, pp. 100–101). Referring to Marx, some scholars considered Smith’s theory critically. For instance, Chogoro Maide insisted that Smith did not elaborate the labor theory of value sufficiently compared to Marx because Smith, unlike Marx, did not explain labor as the sole origin of value (Maide Reference Maide1923, p. 57).

On the other hand, Marxist scholarship also affected Smith’s scholarship indirectly via the debate over Japanese capitalism. Economists debated whether Japanese society had become a fully liberal, bourgeois, or capitalist society after the Meiji Restoration. Influenced by Marxist theory, many assumed that a bourgeois revolution—marked by the elimination of feudal hierarchies and the emancipation of individuals from state control of the economy—was a necessary precursor to communist revolution. Within this context, two rival Marxist schools emerged. The Koza-ha argued that post-Meiji Japan remained only partially capitalist, with remnants of semi-feudal relations persisting in both agriculture and manufacturing. They advocated first for a bourgeois revolution. In contrast, the Rono-ha maintained that Japan had already achieved a fully capitalist structure and was thus ready for a proletarian revolution (Nagaoka Reference Nagaoka1984). This debate affected Mizuta’s intellectual commitment. Mizuta adopted the Koza-ha position, insisting that Japanese society required the establishment of liberal order represented by Smith’s thought (as I argue in the next section).

Behind Mizuta’s intellectual commitment was Japanese social structure. Mizuta came of age during a period marked by a newly emerging social hierarchy between capitalists and workers, following Japan’s Westernization. Born in Tokyo, he lived from the age of three in Aoyama, an area marked by pronounced class divisions. At the top of the slope in northern Aoyama resided the aristocracy and the heads or managers of zaibatsu conglomerates; at the bottom were slums or semi-slum districts. Mizuta’s family lived midway on the slope, among the middle class (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1985, pp. 11–12).

Mizuta’s view of Japanese society was shaped by the growing economic polarization caused by industrialization before the end of the Second World War. From the 1880s to the 1920s, Japan experienced rapid economic development and urban population growth (Nishikawa and Abe Reference Nishikawa and Abe1990). Particularly after World War I, traditional industries faced growing competition from modern Westernized industries equipped with updated management practices and technologies (Nakamura Reference Nakamura1985, ch. 7). By the early twentieth century, three major zaibatsu conglomerates controlled roughly 30% of total assets in mining and manufacturing (Takeda Reference Takeda2020, ch. 1). Their owners and executives enjoyed high incomes, while many industrial workers continued to live in poverty. These structural inequalities were visible even within the spatial geography of Aoyama, where Mizuta directly encountered a sharply divided industrial society.

It was in this context that Mizuta entered university and came under the influence of Takashima, whose thought formed the intellectual foundation of Mizuta’s Smithian liberalism. In 1936, Mizuta enrolled in the Preparatory Department of Tokyo University of Commerce (later Hitotsubashi University). After completing it, he entered the Department of Commerce and in 1939 joined the seminar of Takashima.

Takashima’s liberal vision of Smith, based on the ideal of a free, equal society, deeply influenced Mizuta. He expanded on Takashima’s conception of civil society, adopting it as a key analytical framework for assessing the kind of modern society Japan should strive to become. To understand why Mizuta turned to Smith in his effort to critique and reform Japanese society, we need to consider the specific problems confronting Japanese intellectuals at the time. Before fully engaging with Smith, Mizuta also explored how European societies had developed both intellectually and institutionally.

Takashima was a professor of the history of economic thought whose scholarship on Smith became the cornerstone of Mizuta’s own research. Takashima asked Mizuta to proofread two of his works: a volume of excerpts from The Wealth of Nations, published as Select Chapters and Passages from the Wealth of Nations (Reference Takashima1940), and his major work Keizaishakaigaku no konpon mondai (The fundamental problems of economic sociology) (1941) (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1985, p. 112). The latter, in particular, was crucial for Mizuta’s subsequent intellectual development.

Takashima’s work Keizaishakaigaku no konpon mondai marked a turning point in Japanese Smithian scholarship. Although Smith had already been the subject of considerable study, his reception in Japan followed specific trajectories. To counter criticisms of Smithian liberalism, Takashima sought to defend and deepen Smithian thought. He did not present Smith merely as an advocate of economic liberalism or as a proponent of non-interventionist government policy. While acknowledging this interpretation, Takashima developed a distinctive perspective on the political dimensions of Smith’s liberalism (Takashima Reference Takashima1997–98, vol. 2, pp. 21–22). While Smith was often portrayed as a laissez-faire economist, Takashima viewed him not only as an economic liberal but also as a political one. He argued that Smith understood eighteenth-century Britain as a civil society—a society of citizens rather than one dominated by religion, military authority, or state politics. For Smith, commercial society was composed of individuals engaged in voluntary exchange, a form of interaction predicated on equality (Takashima Reference Takashima1997–98, vol. 2, pp. 126–127). This principle of equal exchange, Takashima contended, extended beyond economics to inform broader societal relations, including those in religion, the military, and politics (Takashima Reference Takashima1997–98, vol. 2, p. 127). In this way, Smith’s vision of civil society was not only economically just but also politically free, equal, and mutually supportive. Takashima emphasized that Smith’s commercial society relied on justice and the protection of equal exchange as the foundation of liberty. For Takashima, this indicated that Smith’s economic liberalism was inseparable from a broader political liberalism rooted in civil society. In such a society, individuals were not merely economic agents but equal citizens capable of mutual recognition and support. Accordingly, Takashima’s interpretation moved beyond the conventional dichotomy between laissez-faire policy and protectionism, offering a more holistic vision of Smithian liberalism as a socio-political ideal.

III. HIROSHI MIZUTA: A JAPANESE CONTEXT OF A SMITHIAN LIBERALISM

This section explores Mizuta’s formative years, with a focus on his liberalism.Footnote ⁷ Influenced by his mentor, Takashima, Mizuta studied Adam Smith as an advocate of a free and liberal society. His engagement with Smith was not merely academic but also grounded in a critical awareness of Japan’s semi-feudal and paternalistic social structure, which he sought to reform into a more egalitarian and free society. Mizuta came to recognize the structural problems of Japanese society through his engagement with debates on Japanese capitalism. He later delved into Smith’s intellectual background and historical context, contributing significantly to Japanese scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment.

Underlying Mizuta’s engagement with Smith was the broader intellectual debate over Japanese capitalism in the 1920s and 1930s (as I argued in the last section). It was this debate that Mizuta encountered during his university days and that he was sympathetic to with the Koza-ha perspective. He was particularly influenced by Yasoji Kazahaya’s Nihon shakaiseisakushi (Japanese history of social policy) (1937), rather than by Moritaro Yamada’s more prominent Nihon shihonshugi bunseki (An analysis of Japanese capitalism) (1934), a major Koza-ha text. Kazahaya’s work provided Mizuta with an overview of Japanese capitalism and a framework for assessing its developmental trajectory.

Kazahaya analyzed the history of Japanese industrialization and social policy from the Meiji Restoration to the 1930s. He argued that Japanese capitalism resembled the German model more than the British one. Specifically, he described Japan as a hybrid of pre-Bismarckian and Nazi-era German capitalism (Kazahaya Reference Kazahaya1937, p. 474). While liberal economies required the institutional protection of workers’ rights—such as the right to organize—these were absent in Japan. Although Nazi Germany and Japan both rejected economic liberalism, Kazahaya argued that Nazi policy had transformed liberal capitalism, whereas Japan had never fully embraced it (Kazahaya Reference Kazahaya1937, p. 342). In Japan, the lack of workers’ rights necessitated paternalistic government intervention, similar to early stages of German capitalism (Kazahaya Reference Kazahaya1937, pp. 442–444).

Kazahaya further argued that Japan’s labor policy, shaped by its military interests, treated workers primarily as a source of soldiers. This approach also catered to the interests of manufacturers, contributing to weak labor protections—including poor working conditions for women and children and insufficient regulation of working hours (Kazahaya Reference Kazahaya1937, pp. 121–122). In contrast, Britain’s factory legislation and labor unions emerged from voluntary movements by workers themselves (Kazahaya Reference Kazahaya1937, pp. 131–132). Through Kazahaya, Mizuta came to view Japanese capitalism as paternalistic and deficient in basic civil and economic rights—an implicit contrast to the individual freedom and rights emphasized in Smithian liberalism.

Inspired by the Marxist debates over Japanese capitalism, Mizuta concluded that Japanese society was not yet fully free or equal. He later recalled that Yamada’s analysis was too pessimistic to offer any practical vision for reform (Mizuta Reference Mizuta and Takeuchi2015, p. 21). Although Mizuta aligned with the Koza-ha in viewing Japanese society as insufficiently modernized, he found Yamada’s work unhelpful in identifying concrete pathways for transformation.

To address this gap, Mizuta began searching for what he called the “bearer of history” in intellectual and scientific development, even during his university years. Influenced by Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he considered how specific groups or classes historically became agents of social transformation. Drawing also on Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, Mizuta proposed that under certain historical conditions, a particular class could emerge as the bearer of history—capable of expressing and realizing the social ideals for social change as if they were objective and inevitable truths (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1985, pp. 118–119).

This framework resonated with the intellectual work of other economists and historians during and immediately after World War II, including Takashima. Like them, Mizuta sought to identify historical actors whose ideas could transform society. For Mizuta, Smith became one such figure: a bearer of history who articulated the intellectual foundations of a free and equal modern society. He traced this development from Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes to Smith, presenting them as part of a broader lineage of European political and economic thought.

Mizuta thus approached European intellectual history with the aim of understanding the normative and institutional conditions that made a liberal society possible. In particular, he investigated how British liberalism emerged within a broader historical context. His undergraduate thesis, written in 1941, was titled “Seiseiki kokuminkokka no shisoteki kenkyu” (The intellectual study of the early nation-state). In it, Mizuta argued that the modern nation-state was founded on modern natural jurisprudence, which legitimized and supported life in modern civil society (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1941, vol. 1, p. 5). Crucially, he emphasized that Smith’s political economy was grounded in this tradition of natural law, which provided both normative and necessary principles.

In contrast to the prevailing view of economics as a value-free science, Mizuta maintained that Smith’s political economy could not have emerged without the normative assumptions of natural jurisprudence (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1941, vol. 1, p. 9). He traced the intellectual shift from the medieval world view—centered on divine authority—to the Renaissance project of constructing a human-centered social order. Thinkers like Machiavelli envisioned a society based on rational, virtuous individuals (uomo virtuoso), though they struggled to establish a new moral order (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1941, vol. 1, pp. 35–41). These thinkers broke from the medieval, non-individualistic conception of society, advocating instead a view of individuals as free and equal, although they had not yet integrated this vision into a coherent institutional framework (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1941, vol. 1, p. 473).

In Mizuta’s reading, Hobbes represented a pivotal moment in this intellectual evolution. Hobbes replaced the uncertain workings of fortuna with rational laws derived from individual necessity. Smith, in turn, reconciled fortuna with rational individual activity (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1941, vol. 4, p. 1608). For Mizuta, Smith’s liberalism centered on the ideal of rational, self-governing individuals. It was on this foundation of self-control and individual autonomy that Smith constructed a vision of a liberal order—one in which individuals could act freely within a just and mutually supportive society.

Motivated by his studies of both European and Japanese history, Mizuta became increasingly interested in Takashima’s interpretation of Adam Smith as a liberal, and sought to contextualize it within the broader rise of individualism and the development of political economy. Although his research was interrupted by military service during World War II, he continued to read extensively during this period. Among the books that left a strong impression on him was Franz Borkenau’s Der Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild: Studien zur Geschichte der Philosophie der Manufacturperiode (1934). Mizuta read the first half of the book in its Japanese translation, published in 1935, and was intellectually stimulated by it (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1985, pp. 166–167).

Despite his excitement, Mizuta remained critical of Borkenau’s conclusions. Borkenau argued that the bourgeois world view was inherently pessimistic and incapable of sustaining a robust social science—a position Mizuta considered symptomatic of a certain kind of “radical leftism,” which he distrusted. Nonetheless, Mizuta acknowledged Borkenau’s valuable insights, particularly his emphasis on the historical significance of natural law (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1985, p. 130). When Mizuta later translated Borkenau’s work in 1959, he underscored Borkenau’s focus on the transition from a feudal to a civic world view, as traced through thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to Blaise Pascal, and the centrality of natural law and jurisprudence in that process (Mizuta Reference Mizuta, Borkenau and Mizuta1959, p. 9).

After the end of World War II, with Takashima’s support, Mizuta became a research fellow at Tokyo University of Commerce. During this period, he collaborated with Takashima on the Japanese translation of Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, which was published in 1947 (Smith Reference Smith, Takashima and Mizuta1947). He also translated Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in Reference Hobbes1949, and devoted considerable attention to Hobbes’s political thought. After securing an assistant professorship at Nagoya University’s Department of Law and Economics, Mizuta continued his investigations into the intellectual foundations of liberal society (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1985, pp. 205–221).

Mizuta expanded upon Takashima’s reading of Smith’s civil society as composed of equal citizens, integrating this perspective into his broader study of moral philosophy. In 1954, he published a monograph titled Kindaijin no keisei: kindaishakaikan seiritsushi (The formation of modern people: The history of the origins of the modern view of society). In this work, Mizuta traced the development of modern natural jurisprudence, which, he argued, presupposed individuals who were free and equal. He revisited the thought of Machiavelli and the Renaissance before turning to Hobbes, whom he identified as a pivotal figure in grounding political thought in the equal rights of individuals (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1954, pp. 5–7, 270). At the same time, Mizuta acknowledged that Hobbes, recognizing the disruptive potential of human passions, justified the necessity of sovereign authority and endorsed a form of absolutism (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1954, pp. 282–283). In this respect, Hobbes marked a turning point in the formation of the modern, equal, and free view of society—a view that deeply shaped Mizuta’s understanding of liberalism, likely influenced by Takashima’s emphasis on the political dimensions of Smith’s civil society.

Yet Mizuta’s conception of an ideal society ultimately diverged from Takashima’s. Although both thinkers valued the ideal of a civil society composed of free and equal citizens, and both regarded Smith as its intellectual exemplar, their political philosophies were not fully aligned. Takashima, in Keizaishakaigaku no konpon mondai, argued that the development of the modern nation-state was a necessary condition for the emergence of civil society (Takashima Reference Takashima1997–98, vol. 2, pp. 430–432). In 1950, he further elaborated this position in Atarashii Aikokushin (The new nationalism), where he posited that just as the bourgeoisie had historically transformed feudal society into capitalism, the proletariat would lead the transformation from capitalism to socialism (Takashima Reference Takashima1997–98, vol. 3, pp. 372–373). For Takashima, nationalism could serve as a progressive force in this revolutionary transition. Although he sharply criticized the particular form of Japanese nationalism that prioritized the state and family over the individual, he still regarded nationalism—understood in a more universalist and emancipatory sense—as essential to social transformation (Takashima Reference Takashima1997–98, vol. 3, pp. 426, 431).

Mizuta, however, expressed clear reservations about this position. While acknowledging that Takashima had essentially “created” the modern Japanese idea of civil society (Mizuta Reference Mizuta and Watanabe2000a, p. 19), he remained critical of Takashima’s reliance on nationalism. In Mizuta’s view, Takashima’s social theory placed the nation, rather than the individual, at the center of historical analysis. Consequently, it failed to account for how individuals, acting as citizens, could initiate democratic reform. Mizuta contended that Takashima’s model lacked a conception of direct democracy grounded in grassroots citizen movements (Mizuta Reference Mizuta and Watanabe2000a, p. 36). This critique revealed a fundamental philosophical divergence: Where Takashima emphasized the nation as the agent of social change, Mizuta insisted on the primacy of the autonomous individual as the bearer of democratic transformation.

Mizuta’s scholarship on Smith was firmly rooted in these liberal and democratic commitments. His early work, Adam Smith kenkyu nyumon (Introduction to the study of Adam Smith) (1954), later revised and expanded in 1968 as Adam Smith kenkyu (Adam Smith studies), laid the foundation for his lifelong engagement with Smith’s thought. In these works, Mizuta sought to evaluate Smith’s intellectual contributions in relation to the development of modern liberal society.

According to Mizuta, Hobbes had dismantled the medieval conception of morality as grounded in universal laws external to human beings. In Hobbes’s view, individuals—endowed with equal faculties and natural rights—could form a political society but only through the imposition of order by a sovereign authority. He did not imagine that individuals could maintain order independently. By contrast, British moral philosophers from Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury to Francis Hutcheson proposed that social order could emerge from individuals themselves, without the use of coercive power. However, since they could not explain how self-interested individuals might sustain such an order, they placed heavy emphasis on altruism as the moral foundation of society. Smith’s intellectual project in The Theory of Moral Sentiments was, for Mizuta, a decisive development. Smith aimed to show how self-interested individuals could nonetheless uphold social and moral order. Central to this argument was the concept of sympathy. Smith’s sympathy was not to be confused with compassion; rather, it referred to the imaginative capacity to adopt another’s perspective across a wide range of sentiments. The impartial spectator, a central figure in Smith’s moral philosophy, enables individuals to reflect on and regulate their behavior in relation to others. This mechanism, Mizuta argued, explained how moral order could emerge from the interactions of self-interested agents. Smith, however, was critical of the superficial satisfaction derived from such pursuits (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1968, pp. 112–118). For Mizuta, allowing ordinary people to freely pursue economic activities represented a potential path to dismantling the semi-feudal and paternalistic elements of Japanese society. Smith’s liberal economics appeared as a liberating force for the Japanese people.

However, following Japan’s rapid postwar economic growth, Mizuta began to shift his focus in Smith studies toward the question of morality. This transition also reflected a critical revision of the earlier image of Smith as the theorist of homo economicus. Mizuta increasingly emphasized Smith’s moral philosophy, particularly in response to the ethical challenges of developed economies. Rather than as one who celebrated unrestrained economic activity, Mizuta came to see Smith as a thinker who recognized the moral risks of commercial society and sought to ground economic behavior in ethical principles.

This shift is most evident in Mizuta’s essay “Adam Smith ni okeru dokan gainen no seiritsu: ‘tanin no sonzai wa kare no gakusetsu ni totte ketteiteki na yakuwari wo hatashite iru’—Ota Yoshio, Adam Smith no dotoku tetsugaku ni tsuite” (The formation of the concept of sympathy in Adam Smith: The existence of others plays a decisive role in his theory—On Yoshio Ota’s moral philosophy of Adam Smith), written in 1968 and later republished in Mizuta (Reference Mizuta2009, ch. 2). The essay was written in honor of Yoshio Ota, Mizuta’s teacher at the Preparatory Department of the Tokyo University of Commerce. While early Japanese studies of Smith had focused primarily on The Wealth of Nations, Ota had already engaged deeply with The Theory of Moral Sentiments prior to World War II (e.g., Ota Reference Ota1938). Ota had criticized August Oncken’s Adam Smith und Immanuel Kant (1877), which portrayed Smith’s concept of sympathy as passive and purely psychological. Against this reading, Ota insisted that Smith’s sympathy was an ethical concept that enabled the development of moral norms (Ota Reference Ota1938, p. 715).

Mizuta’s Reference Mizuta1968 essay marked a turning point away from the earlier interpretation of Smith as advocating the liberation of self-interest, as in Kazuo Okouchi (Okouchi Reference Okouchi1969, vol. 3, pp. 214–221). He aimed to reconsider the conceptual and historical context of Smith’s theory of sympathy. For Mizuta, Smith’s sympathy was not inherently ethical; rather, it was morally neutral. He argued that earlier scholars, by moralizing the concept of sympathy, had misunderstood it. This misunderstanding led to the so-called Adam Smith Problem—the perceived incompatibility between the altruistic sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the self-interest driving economic behavior in The Wealth of Nations. Mizuta rejected this dichotomy, asserting that Smith’s conception of sympathy was compatible with self-interest precisely because it was not grounded in altruism (Mizuta Reference Mizuta2009, p. 29).

In doing so, Mizuta not only resolved a central interpretive dilemma in Smith studies but also recontextualized Smith’s moral philosophy within the broader trajectory of British moral thought—from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson to David Hume and Smith. Whereas Shaftesbury and Hutcheson questioned whether the general populace was morally capable and thus relied on elite virtue, Smith, Mizuta argued, envisioned a moral order sustained by ordinary individuals. Smith’s sympathy assumed a moral equality among people; it was a non-hierarchical ethics grounded in mutual recognition (Mizuta Reference Mizuta2009, p. 34).

This interpretation reinforced Mizuta’s enduring commitment to democratic liberalism. In contrast to views that reserved moral agency for elites or relied on external authority—whether state, sovereign, or nation—Mizuta’s Smithian vision affirmed the moral capacity of all individuals to contribute to society’s ethical fabric. In this way, Mizuta deepened his vision of liberalism as not only a political and economic ideal but also a moral one—centered on the autonomy, equality, and dignity of each individual.

From this broader interpretive framework, Mizuta also reflected critically on the limitations of Smith’s moral philosophy within the trajectory of intellectual history. These limits became particularly clear in his critique of John Greville Agard Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975), which Mizuta addressed in his 1988 essay “Scotland keimo to shimin kakumei” (The Scottish Enlightenment and bourgeois revolution), written in 1988 (later republished in Mizuta Reference Mizuta2009, ch. 15). There, Mizuta directly challenged both Pocock’s account and the intellectual history advanced by Nicholas Phillipson, whose interpretation of Smith was deeply influenced by Pocock (Phillipson Reference Phillipson, Hont and Ignatieff1983).

Mizuta contended that Pocock’s conception of civic humanism overextended the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment by retroactively projecting its “moment” too broadly across revolutionary Europe. In particular, Phillipson’s attempt to depict Smith as a civic humanist, in line with Pocock’s republican framework, ultimately faltered because Smith’s thought did not fit that mold. For Mizuta, the Scottish Enlightenment—far from persisting into the revolutionary era—receded in influence after the American and French revolutions. In the face of these upheavals, many of the moderate figures of the Scottish Enlightenment became more conservative in their outlook. According to Mizuta, it was not the moderates but rather figures outside the moderate Enlightenment mainstream who carried forward its intellectual legacy (Mizuta Reference Mizuta2009, p. 317).

Despite recognizing these limits, Mizuta deepened his contextual study of Smith by investigating the broader intellectual currents of the Scottish historical school—a direction he had already begun to explore in the 1960s. In 1967, he noted the revival of interest in eighteenth-century Scottish literature and intellectual life. He drew attention to figures such as Lord Monboddo, Lord Kames, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson, emphasizing their contributions to debates on civilization, human nature, and social development. These thinkers, Mizuta argued, explored the dynamic relationship between historical progress, human productivity, and moral psychology. In this sense, Mizuta saw the Scottish historical school as a forerunner of materialist approaches to social thought (Mizuta Reference Mizuta1968, p. 249).

Through this work, Mizuta laid the foundation for the later development of Japanese scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment. His pioneering contributions not only redefined the study of Smith in Japan but also helped shape a broader intellectual tradition that combined historical inquiry with normative reflection.

Furthermore, Mizuta’s contributions to Smithian scholarship extended beyond Japanese academia. His publication of Adam Smith’s Library, a comprehensive catalogue of books owned by Smith (Mizuta Reference Mizuta2000b), has gained international recognition. As Mizuta recalled, in the mid-1950s, Kazuo Okouchi encouraged him to re-examine James Bonar’s earlier catalogue of Smith’s library, which was known to contain several inaccuracies. Around that time, Mizuta visited Glasgow and inspected Smith’s surviving books, which prompted him to recognize the necessity of producing a revised and more accurate catalogue (Mizuta et al. Reference Mizuta2017, p. 2).

To undertake this revision, Mizuta relied on A Catalogue of Books Belonging to Adam Smith, Esqr. (Smith Reference Smith1781), a list compiled by Smith himself and later acquired by the University of Tokyo. While Bonar and many European scholars had likely not consulted this source, Mizuta was able to use it to correct and expand upon Bonar’s work (Mizuta et al. Reference Mizuta2017, pp. 7–8). Mizuta’s examination of Smith’s library reflects his broader intellectual project: to uncover the historical realities underlying Smith’s intellectual formation.

In the postwar period, Mizuta and his contemporaries began to travel to Europe and actively sought to reconstruct the intellectual and social world of eighteenth-century Scotland. Nonetheless, before the end of World War II, access to European books in Japan was limited by their high cost, and few scholars had the opportunity to conduct research abroad. As a result, understanding of the historical context in which Smith lived and wrote remained fragmentary. Mizuta pursued this aim of his studies through meticulous study not only of Smith’s personal library but also of the broader context of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Inspired by Mizuta’s approach—and by ongoing developments in European and American historiography—Japanese historians of economic and social thought increasingly turned their attention to the Scottish Enlightenment, especially from the late 1970s onward. One of the most significant figures to emerge in this context was Hideo Tanaka, whose work would further extend and reinterpret the legacy of Smithian liberalism within a distinctively Japanese intellectual framework.

IV. HIDEO TANAKA: RECONSIDERING LIBERALISM IN TERMS OF REPUBLICANISM

Hideo Tanaka (hereinafter Tanaka) was one of Japan’s leading scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment and republicanism. This section examines how Tanaka received and revised Mizuta’s interpretation of a liberal Adam Smith. While Mizuta had emphasized Smithian liberalism as a moral and political alternative to Japanese paternalism, Tanaka argued that economic development alone was insufficient to create a civil society. For Tanaka, civil society required the cultivation of public spirit—a sense of civic virtue and collective responsibility that did not automatically arise from market mechanisms. This led him to reconsider Smith through the broader lens of the Scottish Enlightenment, with particular attention to republicanism and the civic foundations of liberty.

Tanaka’s interest in the intellectual foundations of liberal society was shaped by his own intellectual formation. Born in Shiga Prefecture in 1949, he studied economics at Shiga University and later entered the Graduate School of Economics at Kyoto University. There, he came under the supervision of Masaharu Tanaka (1925–2000), a scholar of Russian economic thought, Max Weber, and the history of liberalism. After completing his doctoral coursework at the Graduate School of Economics, Kyoto University, in 1978 (and earning his PhD in 1993), Tanaka began his academic career as a lecturer at Konan University in 1981. He returned to Kyoto University in 1990 as an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Economics and was promoted to full professorship in 1996, a position he held until his retirement in 2013.Footnote ⁸ He passed away on December 19, 2023, at the age of seventy-four.

Tanaka played an important international role in advancing the study of the Scottish Enlightenment. He made particularly significant contributions to situating Smith’s moral philosophy and political economy within the broader intellectual and historical context of the Scottish Enlightenment, thereby moving beyond narrowly economic interpretations of Smith. His work consistently emphasized that Smith’s thought could be fully understood only when read alongside Scottish contemporaries. Together with Tatsuya Sakamoto, Tanaka edited the volume The Rise of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Sakamoto and Tanaka Reference Sakamoto and Tanaka2003), which introduced Japanese research to a wider audience. In this collection, Tanaka examined the political thought of John Millar, highlighting the ways in which Millar’s analysis of civil society, historical development, and liberty extended and transformed Smithian themes. He subsequently traced a republican strand within the Enlightenment tradition, from Hutcheson to Millar through Smith, arguing that concerns with civic virtue were central rather than peripheral to this intellectual movement (Tanaka Reference Tanaka, Sakamoto and Tanaka2003). Tanaka further broadened this perspective by exploring the transatlantic reception of the Scottish Enlightenment. His study of the Enlightenment in America (Tanaka Reference Tanaka2010) demonstrated that Smithian political economy acquired new meanings when embedded in republican debates about citizenship and self-government. By extending his analysis beyond both Scotland and Japan, Tanaka underscored the historical variability of Smith’s legacy and the importance of reception in shaping its significance.

Tanaka’s influence extended well beyond his publications. He played a central role in fostering the field of Scottish Enlightenment and republican studies in Japan. During his years at Kyoto, Tanaka supervised numerous scholars—including the author of this paper—across the fields of economic, social, and political thought. His graduate seminar became a vibrant intellectual community that produced many of the leading scholars in Japanese intellectual history. He also played a key role in international scholarly communication. He hosted lectures by Pocock, Istvan Hont, Christopher J. Berry, and other scholars.

In 1986, Hideo Tanaka cotranslated a collection of Friedrich Hayek’s essays with Masaharu Tanaka. In the accompanying commentary, Masaharu described Hayek’s liberal society as one premised on open competition—a society in which individuals were free to compete without state intervention. Yet he also acknowledged the difficulty of returning to the nineteenth-century model of laissez-faire capitalism in a world accustomed to the welfare state and government regulation (Hayek Reference Hayek, Tanaka and Tanaka1986, p. 284). Like Masaharu, Hideo Tanaka was not a proponent of Hayekian liberalism. Instead, he was interested in tracing the historical origins and evolution of the ideas underpinning liberal society. During his early years in Kyoto, he read not only classical liberal thinkers but also Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, as well as French and British revolutionary thought (Tanaka Reference Tanaka2013, p. 55). His engagement with liberalism was therefore balanced by a deep awareness of its critiques and historical alternatives.

After Masaharu Tanaka’s retirement in 1974, Tanaka came under the supervision of Toshihiko Hirai (1925–2003), a historian of economic and social thought who studied a wide range of thinkers from John Locke and Shaftesbury to Georg Lukács and Jürgen Habermas. Under Hirai’s influence, Tanaka expanded his intellectual horizons. He began researching Thomas Hobbes and wrote his master’s thesis on Hobbes’s social philosophy, titled "Hobbes shakaitetsugaku no hoho to igi" (The method and significance of Hobbes’s social philosophy).

By the early 1970s, Tanaka had read Mizuta’s Kindaijin no keisei (The formation of modern individuals) as well as Franz Borkenau’s From the Feudal World View to the Civic World View in translation (Tanaka Reference Tanaka2013, pp. 56–57). Like Mizuta, Tanaka saw Hobbes as central to the intellectual genealogy of liberalism. He published several essays on Hobbes in this period, including “Hobbes shakaitetsugaku keiseishi niwokeru rekishi no imi” (The significance of history in the formation of Hobbes’ social philosophy) (1976). In that essay, Tanaka argued that both Hobbes and Locke broke with traditional conceptions of society by grounding social philosophy in natural rights. While Hobbes grounded the social contract in a principle of mutual agreement among equals, Locke envisioned civil society as existing prior to the state—but paradoxically excluded the poor laborer from this social compact. Tanaka praised Hobbes for articulating the idea of natural human equality and the right to subsistence (Tanaka Reference Tanaka1976, pp. 112–113).

In another essay, “Hobbes no shokironsetsu ‘Thucydides no shogai to rekishi’ ni tsuite” (On Hobbes’s early essay ‘Of the life and history of Thucydides’) (Tanaka Reference Tanaka1977), Tanaka traced the early stages of Hobbes’s thought, showing that Hobbes had not yet developed a full-fledged theory of natural rights or civil society. Tanaka’s interpretation, clearly influenced by Mizuta’s work, positioned Hobbes as an intellectual precursor to modern liberalism, particularly through his emphasis on equality and social order grounded in rational self-interest.

However, Tanaka did not limit himself to Hobbes. In the 1970s and 1980s, he increasingly turned his attention to the Scottish Enlightenment, reflecting the growing scholarly interest in Enlightenment thought in Japan during that time. Inspired by Mizuta and other scholars, including Satoshi Yamazaki, Takeshi Sasaki, and Kyoji Tazoe, Tanaka began investigating the broader intellectual and political currents of eighteenth-century Scotland.

During his tenure at Konan University—where he taught until 1990—Tanaka published several essays on the Scottish Enlightenment. These culminated in his first major monograph, Scotland keimo shisoshi kenkyu: bunmeishakai to kokusei (The study of the history of the Scottish enlightenment thought: Civilized society and constitution) in 1991. As he later reminisced, in this work, Tanaka analyzed the ideas of key Scottish thinkers—not only Smith and Hume, but also Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, and others—and situated their thought within broader debates about civilization, sociability, and constitutional development (Tanaka Reference Tanaka2013, pp. 61–62).

This work marked a turning point in Japanese scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment. While Mizuta and earlier scholars had already made substantial contributions to the field, Tanaka’s study broadened its scope by examining a much wider range of Enlightenment figures and themes. He offered a more comprehensive intellectual history of the Scottish Enlightenment, analyzing not only the well-known thinkers such as Hume and Smith but also lesser-studied figures in their historical and political contexts.

In the first chapter of the book, Tanaka traced the debate surrounding the 1707 Act of Union between Scotland and England, with particular attention to Andrew Fletcher. Fletcher’s political thought, Tanaka argued, reflected both republican ideals and elements of natural jurisprudence (Tanaka Reference Tanaka1991, ch. 1). Tanaka then turned to Francis Hutcheson, whose republican leanings led him to emphasize civic virtue as essential for the preservation of national identity and liberty (Tanaka Reference Tanaka1991, ch. 2). Unlike Hutcheson, however, David Hume adopted a more individualistic and liberal stance. Recognizing the self-interested nature of human beings, Hume proposed that individuals could generate and sustain rules of justice through social convention. In Hume’s ideal society, Tanaka observed, individuals should enjoy personal independence and be able to live comfortably through their own labor. This, he argued, was possible only in a developed commercial society, where both agriculture and manufacturing were advanced and economic inequality was mitigated to some extent (Tanaka Reference Tanaka1991, pp. 165–166).

Tanaka also investigated other crucial debates, including those on primogeniture as explored by Sir John Dalrymple and Lord Kames, the influence of Rousseau on the Scottish Enlightenment, and how Scottish intellectuals responded to the growing tensions surrounding the American colonies (Tanaka Reference Tanaka1991, ch. 7). Through these studies, Tanaka succeeded in situating the Scottish Enlightenment within its appropriate historical context. Rather than treating these thinkers as abstract philosophers, he asked what debates they were engaged in and what problems they sought to address.

In methodological terms, Tanaka’s work marked a shift away from the Marxist interpretive framework that had shaped earlier Japanese studies of Smith. Mizuta and his contemporaries had read Smith through a Marxist lens, viewing his liberalism as historically limited by its bourgeois character. Tanaka, by contrast, became increasingly critical of this Marxist narrative. In reassessing the political and philosophical relevance of the Scottish Enlightenment, he drew on the Cambridge School of intellectual history—especially the work of Quentin Skinner and Pocock. As Tanaka later recalled, while some Japanese scholars in the 1960s had begun engaging with the contextualist methods of Peter Laslett, John Dunn, Duncan Forbes, James Tully, and Richard Tuck, Japanese academia at the time remained largely dominated by Marxist and radical continental thought—represented by figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. It was not until the 1980s, particularly following the publication of Wealth and Virtue (1983), edited by Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, that Pocock’s influence began to gain traction in Japan (Tanaka Reference Tanaka2013, pp. 140–143).

Adopting this contextualist methodology allowed Tanaka to reinterpret the rise of the modern view of society—what Mizuta had characterized as civil society composed of free and equal citizens—from a new angle. While Mizuta emphasized the ethical and moral underpinnings of liberal society, Tanaka increasingly focused on the republican elements within the Scottish Enlightenment. Although his 1991 monograph already developed this theme, it was further elaborated in his 1996 volume Bunmeishakai to kokyoseishin: Scotland keimo no chiso (Civilized society and public spirit: The strata of the Scottish Enlightenment), which collected essays published between 1979 and 1994.

In this work, Tanaka examined key Enlightenment figures such as Hume, Lord Kames, John Millar, and Adam Ferguson. He paid particular attention to the so-called militia issue—the debate over the role of citizen militias in defending liberty and fostering civic virtue. Tanaka had already studied Millar as a graduate student, but in this context, he presented Millar as a radical Whig and a republican thinker. At the culmination of the Scottish Enlightenment, Millar, according to Tanaka, advanced a political theory that not only upheld the constitutional achievements of the Glorious Revolution but also envisioned further reform. Millar was thus not merely a defender of the existing order but a proponent of political transformation inspired by republican ideals (Tanaka Reference Tanaka1996, p. 154).

This reading of Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment more broadly diverged sharply from Mizuta’s. For Mizuta, the onset of the American and French revolutions marked the end of that Enlightenment. He argued that its moderate figures, including Smith, became increasingly conservative, unable or unwilling to confront the radical changes of the revolutionary era (Mizuta Reference Mizuta2009, p. 317). In Mizuta’s view, Smith’s vision of a free and equal society could not sustain political transformation in the revolutionary context, and the task of societal change fell instead to Marxism, which he saw as the natural successor to the bourgeois revolutions.

Tanaka fundamentally rejected this narrative. He maintained that the Scottish Enlightenment did, in fact, contribute to the political imagination of the revolutionary period. Rather than seeing it as a closed chapter eclipsed by more radical ideologies, Tanaka saw the Enlightenment—particularly in its republican elements—as a living intellectual tradition capable of shaping revolutionary aspirations. His work of 1996 thus reinterpreted Smith and his contemporaries not as passive observers of historical change but as active participants in the reshaping of political and moral life.

Indeed, Tanaka played a pivotal role in introducing Pocock’s work into Japanese scholarship. His book Kyowashugi to keimo: shisoshi no siyakara (Republicanism and the enlightenment: From the perspective of intellectual thought) (1998) marked a significant contribution to the reception of Anglo-American contextualist historiography in Japan (Tanaka Reference Tanaka1998). In collaboration with Takashi Okuda and Kuniyasu Morioka, Tanaka translated Pocock’s seminal The Machiavellian Moment into Japanese in 2008. He also translated several other major works by Pocock, including Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (1993), and the first two volumes of Barbarism and Religion, published in Japanese in 2021 and 2022. Through these translations and his accompanying commentaries, Tanaka made an indelible impact on the Japanese understanding of early modern political thought and historiography, reshaping the field of intellectual history in Japan.

At the heart of Tanaka’s republican studies was a critical diagnosis of the internal contradictions of modern capitalist society. He articulated this view most clearly in Shakai nogakumon no kakushin: shizenhoshiso kara shakaikagaku he (The innovation of the science of society: From natural jurisprudence to social sciences) (2022). There, Tanaka underscored a core tension: Modern commercial society allows individuals to freely pursue their interests so long as they respect the rules of justice, yet it neither requires nor cultivates the moral virtues necessary for a flourishing civic life. As he emphasized, even Smith—despite his robust defense of justice as the minimal condition for economic liberty—recognized that a society devoid of benevolence, fraternity, and mutual concern would be cold and uncomfortable. Commercial society, Tanaka argued, requires virtues beyond justice if it is to sustain genuine social cohesion (Tanaka Reference Tanaka2002, pp. 274–275). Furthermore, in his introduction to an anthology of early modern republicanism (edited by him and Naoshi Yamagiwa) titled Kyowashugi no shiso kukan (The intellectual space of republicanism) (2006), he insisted that recently, since the establishment of liberal order relied on political and bureaucratic institutions, civil voluntary engagement in public affairs was necessary for the critical watch of governmental activities and voluntary NPO associations needed for complementing governmental public activities. This problem of the shortage of civic engagement can be solved by focusing on republicanism, especially by excavating its historical origins (Tanaka Reference Tanaka, Tanaka and Yamagiwa2006, pp. 2–3). This insight led Tanaka to reframe Smith not only as a theorist of liberal economy but also as a thinker aware of the ethical limits of capitalism. In this reading, Smith’s endorsement of competitive markets was tempered by a civic concern for the moral quality of social life. Tanaka’s account thus presented Smith as both a liberal and a republican—a thinker committed to freedom but also to the virtues that make freedom meaningful.

In sum, Hideo Tanaka advanced the study of the Scottish Enlightenment and Adam Smith in Japan by integrating historical contextualism, republican political theory, and a deep concern for the normative underpinnings of modern society. While Mizuta had laid the groundwork by establishing Smithian liberalism as a moral alternative to Japan’s semi-feudal legacies, Tanaka reinterpreted that legacy through the lens of republicanism. Where Mizuta had emphasized the ethical conditions of civil society, Tanaka illuminated its political and civic dimensions, showing that freedom must always be anchored in public virtue and historical consciousness.

V. CONCLUDING REMARKS

Tanaka sought to revise and extend Mizuta’s vision of a Smithian society grounded in freedom and equality. For Mizuta, such a society presupposed the condition in which individuals could pursue their interests freely and equally, without interference from hierarchical or paternalistic institutions. Mizuta’s intellectual project emerged in response to the authoritarian and conformist pressures of wartime and prewar Japan, where state and community enforced behavioral norms and rigid social hierarchies. Against this backdrop, Mizuta championed Adam Smith’s ideal of a civil society composed of autonomous individuals capable of moral judgment and self-governance.

Mizuta’s legacy was beyond the scholarly scope. His vision of a Smithian equal, free society was also associated with his engagement in the citizens’ movement. In Nagoya, he played a pivotal role in changing the Japanese society for more equality and freedom; for instance, he opposed the invitation of the Olympic Games to Nagoya (1977 to 1981) because that city should prioritize the enrichment of citizens’ lives, not the games.Footnote ⁹ He also joined an action against the dispatch of Japanese Self-Defense Forces to Iraq (2003) because the dispatch was unconstitutional and anti-humanitarian.Footnote ¹⁰ Behind this was the idea of civil society of respecting citizens and their lives and opposing the sacrifice of citizens due to governmental policy, as he experienced during World War II. For Mizuta, Smithian civil society meant a person who suggested a better future for Japanese society.

However, the very commitments that made Mizuta’s scholarship influential also revealed certain historiographical limitations. His interpretation of Smith was closely tied to a normative project: He sought to mobilize Smith’s thought as an intellectual resource for reforming Japanese society. In doing so, Mizuta tended to idealize Smith and to treat him less as a historical actor embedded in the constraints of eighteenth-century Britain than as a timeless advocate of modern democratic liberalism. As a result, the historical specificity and limitations of Smith’s political thought were not always fully acknowledged; Smith lived and wrote within a society marked by oligarchic political structures and entrenched social hierarchies.

Tanaka, writing a generation later, encountered a different social reality. In postwar Japan, many of the formal structures of hierarchy had been dismantled, and freedom and equality had advanced considerably. However, this development coincided with rapid economic growth and the expansion of a market-oriented society in which the pursuit of self-interest often displaced civic virtue and public-mindedness. Tanaka perceived this as a critical deficit. Tanaka drew attention to the relative decline, or at least the perceived insufficiency, of civic engagement in public affairs accompanying the expansion of bureaucratic institutions. Although democratic and liberal orders had been formally institutionalized through political and constitutional frameworks, he argued that institutional arrangements alone could not sustain a healthy public life. Democracy without active and participatory civic involvement, informed by a republican ethos, risked degenerating into apathy on the one hand and the tyranny of the majority on the other (Tanaka Reference Tanaka, Tanaka and Yamagiwa2006, pp. 2–3). For Tanaka, the growth of administrative governance tended to displace citizens from direct participation in public matters, transforming them into passive recipients of policy rather than active contributors to collective decision-making. Such a condition weakened the moral and social foundations of liberty, since freedom required not only legal rights but also the habits of public responsibility and mutual oversight cultivated through civic practice. In this respect, liberalism detached from civic virtue could become fragile and even self-undermining. For Tanaka, the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers suggested the dilemma between liberalism and republicanism. That’s why Tanaka thought of the Enlightenment as worth examining.

More generally, Japanese scholarship on Smith has never been a merely passive reception of his works. As in many other national contexts, Smith has served not only as an object of historical study but also as a source of intellectual resources and normative visions for social reform. Yet the particular aspects of Smith that scholars emphasize have varied according to the specific problems and concerns of their respective societies. Smith’s thought has thus functioned as a flexible repertoire of concepts—commercial society, moral sentiments, civic virtue, and institutional design—capable of being reinterpreted in response to changing historical circumstances. In recent years, many scholars have re-examined Smith in order to challenge the image of him as a simple defender of laissez-faire market society. Rather than treating Smith as an advocate of unregulated capitalism, they have stressed the ethical institutional dimensions of his thought. Ryan Patrick Hanley, for example, has highlighted the centrality of moral education and character formation in Smith’s philosophy, portraying him as a thinker concerned with virtue and human flourishing as much as with economic efficiency (Hanley Reference Hanley2019). Such interpretations reveal the inadequacy of reducing Smith to a narrow doctrine of market fundamentalism.

The development of Smith studies in Japan illustrates how the reception of classical thought can generate new intellectual agendas. By selectively emphasizing the liberal and republican elements of Smith’s philosophy, Mizuta and Tanaka reshaped his legacy to address the specific challenges of their own time, thereby producing a historically situated yet creative form of Smithian liberalism.