Friedrich Engels’ letter to the Russian Hegelian philosopher and sociologist Pyotr Lavrov, dated November 1875, stands at the beginning of a critical tradition that portrays the Origin of Species as an expression of laissez-faire economics. The “conjurer's trick” whereby nature and capitalism are confused with one another is said to have resulted from a “social Darwinist” doctrine that rapidly spread the notion that individual competition represents an “eternal law” of human society. It has often been assumed by thinkers from Engels through Richard Hofstadter and recent commentators such as Robert Young that this “puerile procedure” was employed by industrialists of an evolutionist bent to justify the exploitative war of “all against all” that typifies free-enterprise capitalism (Hofstadter Reference Hofstadter1944; Young Reference Young1971; Young Reference Young1985).

It has also been accepted as nearly axiomatic that the Japanese of the Meiji era were especially susceptible to this trick of transference.Footnote ² A defining feature of the civilization and enlightenment movement (bunmei kaika) of the early Meiji period was the wholesale embrace of all things modern as defined by the customs, institutions, and technological advances of the contemporary West. Watanabe Masao reports that Darwinism was first offered as a “coherent system” in a series of widely-influential lectures given by the visiting American zoologist Edward Sylvester Morse at the height of bunmei kaika, in the autumn of 1877 (Watanabe Reference Watanabe1976, 66). Stressing the social application of the theory to human affairs, these lectures, which were eventually translated and published by one of Morse's students, set the pattern by which evolution was “received not as a biological doctrine per se but either as a new interpretation of the world based on ‘science’ or else as a simple slogan such as ‘victory of the superior, defeat of the inferior’ or ‘survival of the fittest,’ applied mainly to social problems” (ibid., 69).

Behind this “Darwinian” influx that characterized early Meiji stood Herbert Spencer, the figure who, to a far greater extent than Darwin himself, determined how evolution would find socio-economic expression. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the new expressions “survival of the fittest,” “struggle for existence,” and “evolution” – as it was also he, writing before the Origin of Species was published, who began projecting laissez-faire economics onto the animal world and then back onto human society – thereby affirming that naturally occurring individual competition was something with which the government should never interfere. Spencer's influence was so enormous that some have convincingly argued that classic social Darwinism was, in fact, a form of “biological Spencerism” or social Spencerism (Harris Reference Harris1968, 129; Bowler Reference Bowler1988).

The transformative influence of such social Spencerism on Meiji Japan is undeniable: not only did Spencer enjoy direct contact with the Meiji oligarchs but twenty of his laissez-faire affirming works made their way into Japanese translation between 1877 and 1888 – a period which saw only four works published on the biological aspects of evolutionary theory (Watanabe Reference Watanabe1976, 66–9; Migita Reference Migita2003, 1–2; Unoura 1991; Nagai Reference Nagai1954). With Spencer as master magician, the Japanese are believed not only to have come under the spell of the conjurer's trick to which Engels refers, but to have performed a further trick on themselves, transferring individual competition to a competition between nations and using this to rationalize imperialism. The dominance of this social Spencerism and its liberal ideology of progress – according to which the law of struggle between individuals naturally and inevitably translates into a vision of progressive development for humankind – allegedly rendered the theory of evolution so indistinguishable from the “bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition” that evolution and progress took on the same name in Japan, shinka.

The writings of Oka Asajirō (1868–1944), Meiji Japan's foremost proponent and popularizer of evolutionary theory, suggest a more complex account of how socio-political ideas transferred to Japan via evolutionism. A German-trained, internationally respected zoologist who oversaw the first full translation of the Origin of Species into Japanese and was responsible for an upsurge of interest in evolutionism in early twentieth century Japan (Migita Reference Migita2003, 2–4), Oka depicted Spencerian individualist competition – classical social Darwinism – not as a law of evolutionary progress but as a tragic sign of species degeneration. For Oka the various species comprising humankind had come to dominate the earth because each minzoku (ethnic nation) functioned as a single biological unit, a consummate group or super-organism that had employed the sophisticated brains and hands of its members to strengthen and organize itself. In the contemporary age of industrial capitalism, however, these attributes had developed beyond group-utility: individuals no longer subordinated themselves to the minzoku but were using their brains and hands to act autonomously, following the dictates of their lesser egos at the expense of the greater ego of the racial collective. The free market economy not only embodied this socially destructive egoism, but in doing so indicated a tragic transition into decadence and eventual extinction. Far from representing a second-hand transference of dog-eat-dog laissez-faire social doctrines on to nature, Oka's widely-read shinkaron (theory of evolution) repudiated the capitalist order as a sign of national decline.

Overlooked by those who have readily assumed a simple “social Darwinist” transference was the international scientific milieu that coincided with the greater part of the Meiji period. In particular, the late 1880s until the First World War constitute an era known to historians of science as the eclipse of Darwinism – an era in which non-Darwinian theories of evolutionism came to predominate (Bowler Reference Bowler1988). As will be shown, Oka's evolutionary critique of capitalism stemmed from one such doctrine, orthogenesis, a non-Darwinian variety of evolution that imagined forces from within organisms directing evolution through predetermined stages that ended in extinction. By focusing on Oka's essay of 1909, “The Future of Humankind,” we will see not only that Oka used one feature of this doctrine, the theory of overdevelopment, to devise his own historicist schema to identify signs of degeneration in his contemporary world, but that the roots of orthogenesis implied a different sort of transference from the one Engels assumed. Instead of laissez-faire values, Oka's evolutionism appeared to embody the state-supporting collectivist proclivities built into the non-Darwinian theories upon which he relied.Footnote ³ It was this implicit statism that enabled Oka to blend his evolutionism with the developmental-organicist socio-political visions of conservative bureaucrat-intellectuals who, during the late Meiji period, were working to forestall the baneful influences of free-enterprise capitalism.

The Non-Darwinian Basis

Oka, it must be emphasized, was no mere popularizer. Though he became a household name in Japan as the result of a best-selling popularization of evolutionary theory, Lectures on Evolutionary Theory (Shinkaron no Koza) (Oka Reference Oka1974), a work which appeared in 1904, just as the Russo-Japanese War was breaking out, he had already established himself as an internationally-respected zoologist for his research into the physiology and structure of various species of fresh-water aquatic invertebrates (Oda Reference Oda1994). A graduate of the Tokyo Imperial University, Oka had gone on to do graduate work in Germany under two of the most renowned evolutionary scientists of the period, August Weismann (1834–1914) and Rudolf Leuckart (1822–1898) (Bowler Reference Bowler1988, 99, 115–8; Lenoir Reference Lenoir1982, 189–94; Nyhart Reference Nyhart1995, 137–8), on the way to earning a doctorate from the University of Leipzig. Within two years of returning to Japan in 1894 he found employment as a professor at the Tokyo Higher Normal School, a position held until his retirement in 1931. Even prior to his best-selling Shinkaron no Koza, Oka had not only published numerous articles in various international science journals but also authored a series of textbooks on zoology and biology for Japanese high school and junior high school students.Footnote ⁴

The numerous essays that Oka began to publish in leading Japanese magazines in the wake of his success as a best-selling author illustrated the centrality of this scientific background to his writing career: not surprisingly they were informed at their very core by the specific field in which he was trained – what was called, as we will see in a moment, evolutionary morphology – and by the related evolutionary theories, such as orthogenesis, that were in vogue during the fin-de-siècle and beyond. It is not enough, however, to simply point out that Oka's depiction of the laissez-faire socio-economic order was the product of his reworking these evolutionary conceptions into his own account of human history. It is also crucial to grasp that these conceptions were non-Darwinian in their basis and were themselves shaped by a variety of evolutionism known as idealist morphology, a metaphysically-oriented evolutionism that predated the Origin of Species by half a century.Footnote ⁵ In order to fully appreciate how the critique of capitalism in “The Future of Humankind” reflected the proclivities inherent in this pre-Darwinian form of biology, it will be useful to say something about how the generation of evolutionary morphologists who taught Oka preserved the idealist conception of the natural world in their response to Darwin's radical materialism. It is this idealist outlook and its political implications that non-Darwinian evolutionism transferred to living nature and that Oka then transferred back on to human society. As will be suggested at the end of this paper, the statist and anti-individualist presuppositions of idealist morphology re-emerge in Oka's critique of capitalist decadence due to his training as an evolutionary morphologist and his use of the theory of orthogenesis.

Idealist morphologists expressed a metaphysical outlook that envisioned living nature as the realization of self-developing essences, or archetypes, into the forms we see around us (Bowler Reference Bowler2003, 120–4; Richards Reference Richards2002). According to this pre-Darwinian form of evolutionism, such archetypes manifested an inner, form-creating developmental drive, one that lent evolution not only direction but organic coherence (Richards Reference Richards1992, 34–6). On the one hand, forms of life were thought to follow a pre-ordained pattern of self-realization: just as individual organisms experience stages of birth, growth, maturity, senility, and death in their lifetime, so too are species destined to emerge and unfold over time in adherence to identical life-cycle phases. A law of parallelism was thought to govern evolution at all levels: individuals, species, and living nature itself would develop in similar fashion, according to this analogy with growth. On the other hand, this shared directionality invested the products of evolution with an integrating purpose that caused them to harmonize and cohere even as natural forms differentiated. Cells and body parts contributed to the overall well-being of an organism in just this manner. Analogously, the “cells” of particular species displayed a similar coherence: as archetypes differentiated and transformed into species, the members of these species did not simply follow the dictates of their individual selves. Instead, like the parts of an individual creature, they tended to coordinate their activities, aligning and, indeed, subordinating themselves to the greater whole of the species type. In other words, idealist morphology imagined individuals as functioning parts of inclusive, harmonized, and evolving unities of nature. Such unities were often conceived as individuals in their own right – each organism possessing a self or ego. For idealist morphology, the primary subject of evolution came to be these species-organisms and the archetype-driven life-cycle trajectory that described their development.Footnote ⁶

After the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), the founder of evolutionary morphology, kept this developmental-organicist vision alive by converting it to naturalism and marginalizing the radical implications of natural selection. Darwin's purely materialist account of descent from nature stipulated that transmutation occurred due to a disturbance in the growth process that produced random variations among each new generation of offspring. That is to say, the theory of natural selection produced not a predetermined developmental pattern, but haphazard branching. In contrast, evolutionary morphology, while accepting the materialist basis of transmutation, preserved the developmental vision of its idealist forbearer by positing a central principle of evolution based on the analogy with growth. Called biogenetic law – a law which Haeckel encapsulated in the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” – this principle conceived the maturation of an individual (its ontogeny) as a repetition of its own species history (its phylogeny). An organism, in other words, would “recapitulate” the stages through which its ancestors had evolved up to the point of full adulthood – after which time, according to Haeckel, it would add on new traits that could be passed on and recapitulated by successive generations. The flip-side of this process was that a species was, in turn, programmed to rise and fall in just the same way its individual members lived and died. Species and individual living beings both developed according to an identical life-cycle pattern. Both behaved like the ego-possessing organisms originally imagined by the now scientifically discredited idealist morphology (Bowler Reference Bowler1988, 72–90; Richards Reference Richards2008; Weikart Reference Weikart2004, 11–13).

Evolutionary morphology even more explicitly preserved the organicist presuppositions of idealism by devising what Haeckel called the hierarchy of organic individuality. The nature of individuality was one of the core problems that biologists were grappling with throughout the nineteenth century, and Haeckel's solution was to ascribe individual consciousness to the lowest constituent parts of organic life and then build more and more complex levels of individuality on that basis. Haeckel's complete hierarchy of organic individuality was elaborated in multiple levels, but for our purposes three echelons were important: the cell, the person (individuals as we tend to understand them), and the super-organism or corm. The account went something like the following: cells were individuals and aggregates of these cells made up persons or cell-states. Persons, also counted as individuals and aggregates of these, comprised the next and highest order of organic complexity, the super-organism. Each of these three levels were not only individuals in the sense that they constituted a morphological whole united by a common physiology but also, due to the directionality built into nature, they possessed ego and a correspondent drive to self-interest. The struggle of existence, therefore, could be seen as competition for survival at any one of these levels where egoism could be expressed (Gould Reference Gould1977, 79–80; Nyhart Reference Nyhart1995, 132–42; Haeckel Reference Haeckel1905, 149–52).

Though Oka's Shinkron no Koza of 1904 called biogenetic law “the principle of evolution” (Oka Reference Oka1974, 122–23), it appears that it was the hierarchy of organic individuality which first led him to evolutionary morphology nearly twenty years earlier. While an undergraduate at the University of Tokyo in the late 1880s, Oka had begun to investigate a curious creature that was found in one of the campus ponds. This creature was the kanten kokemushi or gelatinous moss animal, an aquatic invertebrate which formed colonies around driftwood or rocks. The problem Oka attempted to solve was how these colonies seemingly managed to function as a single organism while each of its constituent moss animals appeared also to live an independent existence. Oka's solution was that these colonies had formed super-organisms: the individual moss animals had subsumed themselves to the aggregate, given up their lesser selves to create the greater self of the group in just the way Haeckel and other evolutionary morphologists had intimated. Each moss animal colony was thus an ego in its own right, and for this creature the struggle for existence took place at this level, the level of the colony or super-organism (Oda Reference Oda1994, 121–4).

Implicit in every “social Darwinian” essay Oka wrote was a belief that this hierarchy also applied to human beings. Whether they knew it or not, humans were in the same predicament as moss animals: the human struggle for survival was played out at the highest level of organic complexity – a contest between super-organisms, not between individual persons. As a consequence, it was vital for humans within each racially interconnected minzoku to preserve national unity at all costs. Humans were, in Oka's view, group-dependent, gregarious creatures and they must embrace their social nature in order to realize the “higher-self” of the racial super-organism and compete with other minzoku. Oka's writings are a constant reminder of this central fact of human life.Footnote ⁷ As we will soon see, Oka came to reject the laissez-faire capitalist order because it marked the subversion of this all-important organic unity and thereby signaled the onset of decline.

Decline entered into the equation not due to evolutionary morphology but through an offshoot theory, one that Oka was most likely exposed to as a graduate student in Germany during the early 1890s. Known as orthogenesis, the theory was part of the “eclipse of Darwinism,” a nearly twenty-year reaction against natural selection. Around the turn of the century, non-Darwinian ideas predominated and many wondered whether Darwinism was a thing of the past (Bowler Reference Bowler1983). Though he depicted himself as a Darwinian, Oka was a product of this milieu. He would have felt especially comfortable turning to orthogenesis for the simple reason that it represented an extrapolation of Haeckel's recapitulationist paradigm. Like biogenetic law, orthogenesis portrayed evolution as patterned after the life-cycle stages of growth that an individual organism undergoes. Orthogenesis differed, however, in that this process was propelled by a non-adaptive inner-drive that caused species to “develop” to the very end of the life-cycle. This meant that more emphasis was placed upon the final growth stages, namely senescence and extinction. Decline and death were thus seen as inherent in evolution, indeed, as its culmination. By embracing orthogenesis, Oka was subscribing to an evolutionary vision that prophesized human degeneration and extinction (Bowler Reference Bowler1988, 141–81).

Oka's account of capitalist degeneracy combined orthogenesis with his views on organic individuality. For him each minzoku was not only a literal individual, a racial super-organism, but was destined to live through the evolutionary cycles of birth, growth, senility, and death that both individuals and species naturally experience. Laissez-faire capitalism of the kind Spencer extolled marked the tipping point when this racial super-organism had passed its peak of growth. Unleashing the lesser ego of individual persons, private property and money-mania caused this super-organism to unravel. In the Haeckelian hierarchy of organic individuality, persons were supposed to play a subordinate, supporting role in the human struggle for existence: they were the cells of the super-organism and their function was to work together so the higher ego of the minzoku could pursue its self-interest. With the onset of the laissez-faire order, however, these “cells” assert their individuality over that of the collective. Instead of adhering to a unity-engendering ethic, individual persons live for personal wealth, status, and luxuries. Decadent ego-driven competition replaces the struggle for existence. The super-organism begins to disintegrate and die out, making it prey to erstwhile weaker competitors.

This critique of entrepreneurial egoism clearly owed much to the idealist philosophical outlook from which evolutionary morphology and orthogenesis were derived. Oka's getting and spending egos disrupted the harmonious, developmental vision of these idealists: not only did they undermine the organic unity of nature, in this case human groups, but their prevalence indicated a fatal moment in the life-cycle stages through which these unities were expected to evolve. At the conclusion of this paper I will suggest that these idealist proclivities were not themselves apolitical but might be said to represent a transference on to nature of a philosophical outlook partial to the state and hostile to individualism (Bowler Reference Bowler2003, 102). First, however, it will be necessary to present the vivid particulars of Oka's criticism of life under laissez-faire and show how it intimates the degeneration of humankind.

Ego Overdevelopment

What it meant for capitalist egoism to supplant the collective ego of the super-organism can be more fully conveyed in light of a central feature of the theory of orthogenesis: the overdevelopment of once-advantageous traits. In Oka's account, human groups had become the dominant life forms on earth due to the superiority of two traits: sophisticated brains and hands. Big brains and dexterous hands made it possible for humans to vanquish all their competitors, allowing them to reign supreme as they do now. Yet, in the end, these traits proved too successful: with evolutionary pressures gone they began to overdevelop and ultimately became an evolutionary liability, undermining the collective life that is the basis of human survival.Footnote ⁸

Oka argued that such overdevelopment determined the fate not just of humans but of all species that had ever occupied a position of unchallenged dominance on the planet. In all such cases traits that had initially ensured pre-eminence over other creatures continued to strengthen and develop their advantageous traits even after mastery had been achieved. Eventually they came to evolve past use, burdening the species in question and rendering them vulnerable to competitors. This was how Oka explained the rise and fall of the dinosaurs: the great size and bulk of particular species were originally advantageous, but once their evolutionary enemies were vanquished they had only each other to fight. In these contests within the species those with greater size and bulk won out – yet the result was a weaker not a stronger species of dinosaur. In the end size and bulk overdeveloped: dinosaurs became too big to compete with other species. They quickly met with defeat and extinction.

Saber-tooth tigers and wooly mammoths suffered similar fates: the same enormous fangs and extended tusks that initially ensured dominance came eventually to overdevelop and doom these animals to extinction. According to Oka this process was an inevitable one – it was predetermined by the orthogenetic drive at the heart of evolutionary change. Overdevelopment inaugurated the senescence phase of species development. Once a species reached this phase, life problems would multiply: muscles and other structures that emerged to support the fangs of the saber-tooth or the tusks of the mammoth would burden the animal, weighing it down, slowing it up. From this point forward, such species were vulnerable to outside competitors – decline toward extinction came rapidly.

In the case of human beings competition occurred at the group level, and it was the brains and hands that facilitated not only victory but also eventual defeat. Humans prevailed over all other creatures because their dexterous hands fashioned tools and their big brains devised language to communicate. Both of these evolutionarily advantageous traits served to fortify the collective existence that is the basis of human life: tools allow humans groups to project their collective will outwardly against competitors and language enabled groups to cohere more effectively into a single unit. Brains and hands, tools and language skills, became more and more sophisticated in concert with one another,Footnote ⁹ until gradually, over generations, the most successful minzoku developed a technological civilization without peer. Human groups became masters of the earth.

As they reached the high point of maturity these groups functioned as well-organized super-organisms. Individual persons still served the higher self of the minzoku. Their brain-power and manual dexterity had evolved in such a way that technological and linguistic-intellectual products helped the group to unite. Tools became either implements to extract resources from nature or weapons with which to hunt and fight. Language led to writing and institutions of social control, such as law, morality, and religion.

The very success of brains and hands in defeating competitors and uniting the super-organism created the conditions that would undermine this achievement. Driven by the inner, orthogenetic logic of evolutionary change, these traits, once the survival threat from competitors was gone, overdeveloped. Brains and hands continued to evolve, but now their increasing sophistication no longer served the interests of the group. Instead, it aided individual persons in a competition with one another. In other words, overdevelopment allowed the hitherto subordinate individuals to harness the intellectual and technological power that had evolved to strengthen the collective. In a sense, the success of brains and hands allowed the egos of individual persons to overdevelop. These individuals would now use their power to strive against each other thereby marking a fundamental shift in human evolutionary history: the end of growth and the onset of orthogenetic decline. From this point on the human struggle of existence would be ratcheted down from the level of super-organisms to that of mere persons – with ominous results for both echelons of human individuality.

Capitalist Degeneracy

For Oka, laissez-faire capitalism was the unmistakable sign that this fatal shift had occurred. Big brains and clever fingers had made it possible for certain humans to ignore the interests of the collective and seize private property for themselves. A “system of lending and collecting interest” and an economy in which “value is attached to money alone” soon ensued (Oka Reference Oka1968, 215). This brain-and-hand enabled a money economy, which triggered the inevitable downfall of the human collective, for it so atomized, divided, and constitutionally weakened humanity that the super-organism would increasingly become incapable of competing and ultimately would die out.

Atomization occurred due to the false evolutionary struggle the money economy encouraged. Where during the ascent of man competition took place between groups, and the actions of individual persons were selected for if they contributed to group strength and solidarity, free market competition shifted competition down the hierarchy of organic individuality to the level of individual persons. In a fatal distortion of the human struggle for existence, isolated individuals now fought against one another and “egoistic self-interestedness” determined who was fit for survival. According to Oka, “the workings of natural selection are suspended after money – along with other things that can be exchanged – came into circulation.” Under laissez-faire the “standard that determines winners and losers is not necessarily superiority of mind and spirit” that enhanced group life, but an atomized egoism that ruthlessly acquired capital at the expense of all other considerations (ibid., 219). These egoists “feel, no matter how much they have, that they lack money. Money and money again – that is certainly all they worry about and they are not allowed a single day of rest” (ibid., 217).

The replacement of group natural selection by the egoistic pursuit of money not only atomized society but divided it against itself. Starkly differentiated classes began to appear and widespread discontent arose.Footnote ¹⁰ “When millionaires overflowing with money and the poverty-stricken, who hide in shame due to the lives they live, exist side by side, it is natural that what develops between them is not good” (ibid., 215). Though they have lost out in capitalist competition these impoverished have-nots also possessed big brains. Thus, unlike the former “eras of ignorant savages and semi-civilization” in which people would not object to “differences in poverty and wealth” and were “satisfied if they can live in safety without freezing or starving,” the cranially overdeveloped poor of the Oka's present were keenly aware of disparities and sought to eradicate them (ibid., 218).

Initially the poor responded by buying into the money-mania: “in order that they themselves can be millionaires, the great many calculate that they must endure hardship and poverty” and they “compete intensely for an indefinite time” (ibid., 215). Yet, ultimately, lack of prospects and the increasing intensification of capitalist competition caught up with the poor: wondering “for what reason they should respect those who are dishonest and greedy” the discontent of the common people became unendurable. They resorted to extreme measures, forming “gangs,” and perpetrating “barbarous acts out of excess of resentment” including “assassinations and insurrections” (ibid., 219). Worst of all, to Oka's thinking, political and intellectual movements inspired by discontent such as “nihilism, anarchism, and socialism” gained currency among the masses, further shattering the harmony of the racial super-organism (ibid., 218).

Accelerating this societal decline was a weakening of the physical constitution and psychic makeup of individual humans. Even as egos had become inflated and set in opposition to one another, the materialistic, industrial civilization produced by the laissez-faire economy had brought on a general enfeeblement. Human life among civilized minzoku had become “estranged from the conditions of nature” and this had rendered individual persons, paradoxically, both too spoiled and too worn out to contribute to the strength and solidarity of the commonweal (ibid., 216).Footnote ¹¹

Modern conveniences were mainly responsible, in Oka's mind, for turning human beings into pampered creatures. Machines and the items they produce resulted in humans living “opposed to nature” to the extent that “the resistance of the body against nature decreases and it becomes emasculated” (ibid.). Special “outfits for cold, heat and rain, mufflers, gloves, ear covers, respirators, goggles . . . mood pills . . . and other miscellaneous items” became prerequisites for survival, and lacking them “illness befalls right away.” Thus, the comforts afforded by technology made humans dependent and weak: “the numerous things needed to sustain life become extremely large, and to that extent the cost of life goes up, the degree of problems increases and still more effort is required for the struggle for existence” (ibid., 217). Burdened by luxuries, humans could no longer eat food that has not been cooked, go outside without wearing socks, or digest meals without the aid of special medicines. Just like the mammoths weighed down by their overdeveloped tusks, humans came to require a vast unnatural, counter-evolutionary support system simply to survive.

The urban-industrial landscape that capitalism created enfeebled human beings more directly. According to Oka, the clash of egos and the “unlimited desire for money” that supplant natural selection were proving much more fierce and violent than anything in nature itself (ibid., 215). Merely living in modern cities and around machines was taxing the individual to the point of nervous and physical collapse. “Even today if we go outside, we ride electric cars and steam trains but the clamorous sound passes through the auditory nerve and stimulates the brain's center.” Motion pictures had the same enervating effect for “at a rate of more than ten times per second, the retina, optic nerve and brain are stimulated by alternating light and darkness” (ibid., 217). The cost of all this “over-stimulation of the nervous system” was that the “nerves gradually weaken” and a state of “morbidity” sets in where “small and trivial things cause extreme worry and concern” (ibid., 218). Along with the dehumanizing conditions in the manufacturing industry itself, where narrow specialization was causing the body to become “inclined in a single direction” (ibid., 223) resulting in each job coming “to have a particular disease associated with it” (ibid., 224), the clamor and tumult of modern life was so wearing people down that the “least adversity leads immediately to disappointment and discouragement or desperation, rash suicide or the committing of terrible crimes” (ibid., 218). Thus, it was to this relentlessly pressing and unnaturally competitive economic order that Oka attributed not only the growing addiction to harmful drugs such as tobacco and alcohol but also the rise in numbers of mental hospitals and prisons.

In short, laissez-faire capitalism, in Oka's view, was cutting individuals loose from the body-politic, inflating their egos with money-lust, turning them one on another, and then proceeding to weaken them in body and mind through enfeebling luxuries and unnaturally intense stress. All of these together had the effect of undermining the “very fragile human instinct for cooperation and consensus.” For Oka “when each individual functions in the world according to such self-interest, enterprises that need cooperation and consensus have no hope of working well” (ibid., 227). In particular, the minzoku, the primary unit in the human struggle for survival, was beginning to dissolve under these conditions: it was no longer functioning as a cohesive racial super-organism but as a mass of disconnected individual persons – overdeveloped egos competing ever more intensely against one another to the point of self-exhaustion.

Oka often described this pathology of ego overdevelopment in terms of the “decay of morality and the corruption of public feeling” (ibid., 220). The morality and religion of the past maintained “cooperation and consensus” by providing “sanction and mutual admonishment” (ibid., 227). In former times the “authority of knowledge was simply obeyed” (ibid., 224), but now, under the sway of “egoistic self-interestedness” morality and religion were powerless to check egoism and preserve organic social cohesion. We have already explored how Oka portrayed the have-nots as first trying to emulate the avarice of the rich before resorting to extremist political movements, mass violence, and various forms of criminal behavior under the psychic stress of industrial life. The reaction of the haves was less extreme but, in its own way, far more significant: they had cynically given up on any notion of morality or service to a higher common good. With brains big enough to realize that they were living through a “transitional period in which the old morality is often violated and a new morality has not yet been selected,” a time in which more often than not “the good perish and bad thrive,” many of the well-off “in the conduct of their lives easily make light of morality” (ibid., 226). For them, self-interested expediency was the only consideration: “they calculate their interests and, on the basis of the struggle for existence, they respect morality when it benefits them to adhere to morals, and they discard morality without looking back when it benefits them to violate morals” (ibid., 225).

Perils to Procreation

This cynical abandonment of morality in favor of egoism finds its literal embodiment in what capitalism had done to procreation and sexuality. Oka imagined money actually superseding lust as a motive for personal action, for “while there is some limit on the desires of the flesh, the desire for money is unlimited” (ibid., 215). In pursuit of this unlimited desire, the ego was subordinating reproduction to the dictates of almighty mammon. The natural urge to procreate was now following money – and this was bringing disastrous consequences for the larger social entity that individuals were meant to serve.

For the majority of individuals, who were of limited means, capitalism translated into an unhealthy postponement of family life. “As living expenses rise, marrying and supporting a family becomes less and less easy. Because one cannot marry until suitable assets have been built up, it naturally comes about that people marry late. The number of people who are not able to marry till middle-age grows.” The danger in this delay was not just that fewer offspring were produced but that “intimate moral habits cannot help but be thrown gradually into disorder.” In Oka's view, “sexual desire among humans in a natural state is a most powerful force” and at the time of life “when youth burns it is hardly the case that it can be controlled coldly by reason.” Inevitably, youth, when “it cannot marry officially,” will pursue “its satisfactions by other means” (ibid., 221).

To the zoologist Oka, it was no surprise that these moneyless singles found their sexual outlet in promiscuous behavior. Yet what bothered him as much as the chaos of “intimate moral habits” was the more overtly biological consequences of these habits: an epidemic of sexually transmitted disease that threatened to permanently harm the racial stock. “If the world becomes this way, syphilis, gonorrhea, soft chancre and other venereal diseases spread right away and there is no known way to stop them.” He was particularly worried about the spread of syphilis: “syphilis horribly weakens the body” and causes “paralysis to set in” when it entered the nerves (ibid.). Not only was the “horrible mental illness” that manifests itself over “two or three years” inevitably fatal, but the disease was passed along to descendents,” leading to a weakening of the “general health of successive generations” (ibid., 222).

“Civilization becomes ‘syphilization'” was how Oka, borrowing an English phrase, summarized this process – a process which was facilitated by the way capitalism was tempting young women it had left single, into prostitution. “Girls, where the anatomy of their bodies is concerned, possess the ability to make money when they lack required capital.” Thus, when “they run up against problems in life, or they feel they lack the money needed to fulfill their vanity, it easily comes about that, in gradations, they decide to sell their bodies to supplement this lack of money.” As the author of several widely used primers on female hygiene and a longtime member of the Ministry of Education's board of teacher certification, Oka seemed particularly disturbed to hear of cases of “co-eds secretly working in order to obtain their tuition fees” (ibid., 221).Footnote ¹²

If capitalistic “syphilization” left the working and middle classes unmarried, diseased, and prostituted, it had an even more baneful effect on those who were well-off enough to start families. Money-mania was convincing them not to postpone marriage but, more disastrously, to “completely change their marriage goals.” “Creating an honorable family and bearing and raising up healthy, successful individuals” – these goals of the past were no longer deemed valid. Instead, individuals were marrying for financial reward and the perks that come with them. “Men plan to marry the daughter of a rich person and gain a hand to rise up in the world” while women think mainly of “living luxuriously without worrying about the problems of life” (ibid., 222).

The danger with these pampered, avarice-driven couples was that they tended to regard childrearing as an afterthought and even a nuisance. Oka particularly worried about modern women whose bodies had already been enfeebled by technological conveniences. Unlike the “primitives of Africa and Australia” who could give birth alone by slipping into the bushes on the course of a journey and quickly catch up with her companions after washing the infant “by the banks of a stream,” women in “civilized countries” required an elaborate technological infrastructure to give birth, one that included hospitals, midwives, nurses, obstetricians and incubators (ibid., 216). The resulting “estrangement from nature” was making childbearing progressively more traumatic. Women who had married as an egoistic life-style choice were thus coming to “hate pregnancy, the result of natural marriage, and, considering every method available, they try to avoid it.” Even when they went to the trouble of having a child many of these women “leave the upbringing to assistants” with the side effect that “the capacity to secrete milk degenerates” (ibid., 222).

Barren breasts and a declining birthrate – both of which Oka claimed were already destroying national power in advanced civilized countries such as France – were showing, like syphilis, late marriage, and prostitution, clear signs that the industrial world of laissez-faire capitalism was undermining the ability of human life to perpetuate itself. The anti-social, amoral, money-hungry egoism at the heart of this capitalist order both incited these social ills and were further fueled by them. The more “syphilization,” in its broadest meaning, spread, the less inclined individuals were to subsume their lesser selves to the greater self of the group. The racial super-organism was becoming increasingly unable to unite, and the degeneracy of the minzoku was accelerating. Ego-centered capitalism, which the overdevelopment of brains and hands brought into being, would prove to be the first step toward extinction.

Statist Correctives

Oka's advice for correcting these ills suggests a different kind of evolution at work in Japan. In contrast to the individualistic, laissez-faire-friendly “social Darwinism” – really Spencerism – assumed by most writers, Oka's application of evolutionism to human affairs was statist in its orientation. We have already seen this outlook manifested in his portrayal of the minzoku as a racial super-organism: gregarious humans survived in nature and came to dominate the planet by functioning as cells in a larger, state-like biological entity. Yet not only did he conceive of a healthy minzoku as something akin to a state organism, he also believed that the job of the contemporary political state was to preserve the organic unity and health of the people. In particular, it was the state's function to correct the disunity and feebleness that the laissez-faire economic order had engendered. The short-term survival of minzoku depended on restoring the population to some semblance of vigor and collective harmony, the very traits that enabled earlier human groups to conquer the earth.

Adopting such measures was especially imperative during the final years of Meiji because Japan's competitors, the more advanced nations of the West, were already, in Oka's estimation, showing signs of the immanent decline that awaits all of humankind. Every one of the portents of doom mentioned above was in evidence among the civilized white countries of Europe and North America. This evolutionary “followership” represented both a danger and an opportunity for Japan. The danger was due to the fact that these advanced civilized minzoku were living out Japan's future: being at the evolutionary forefront also meant they would be first to trace the orthogenetic trajectory past full-bloom maturity and into decline. Their capitalist degeneration, their “syphilization,” was something that would also inevitably afflict Japan. Opportunity lay in the forewarning that Japan had been granted: seeing their competitors go into a tailspin toward extinction would enable the Japanese to take stop-gap measures to hold off, at least for a time, “advanced” enfeeblement and disharmony. Such measures would offer the Japanese enormous advantages and ensure the minzoku's survival in the struggle for existence between super-organisms – at least, that is, until the orthogenetic drive at the heart of evolution completely took over and brought about the inevitable extinction of the Japanese people.

Oka referred to this twilight struggle between doomed nations as “a battle of invalids.” Contemporary humans were “in a condition of an incurable illness and each race-nation, though its condition is still not serious, should be compared to an ill person whose recovery is beyond hope.” However, “because each race-nation which occupies the earth's surface is at daggers with the others” there was no respite during which a nation could be “solely devoted to nursing its illness.” War was the natural condition between nations and those who either fail to prepare militarily or “in whom illness has advanced the quickest” would be vanquished (ibid., 230). Accordingly, the state-measures that Oka had in mind were intended to keep the invalid not only equipped “with a full array of armaments,” but, most importantly, alive and kicking long enough to beat off his evolutionary competitors (ibid., 232).

Oka's recommendations were almost all aimed at reversing the ill-effects of laissez-faire capitalism and the counter-evolutionary ego competition that it spurred on. To turn back the triumph of the moneyed egoists Oka suggested “trust busting and progressive inheritance laws” which he likened to “surgical medical procedures.” To lift up those who had been left behind by the merciless money-mania he mentioned a wide array of “methods of relief such as orphanages, reformatories, charities, associations for sheltering released prisoners, depots for cheap food distribution, free hostels for travelers, funds for worker retirement homes, relief agencies for the impoverished among other means of lending assistance.” All of these measures, Oka asserted, would not be necessary if we could just “protect public morality” and keep the selfless spirit of altruism alive between members of the race-nation (ibid., 231). That, however, was no longer an option: laissez-faire's distortion of the struggle for existence into a relentless, limitless clash of egos had made it impossible for people to live by the Golden Rule and similar traditional teachings. Only state action could now hope to temporarily check “humankind's incurably sick moral decadence” (ibid., 230).

More ominously, Oka believed the state must also step in to further prevent “degeneration of the body” (ibid., 231). This, too, he associated explicitly with the capitalist free-for-all that fostered an economic order in which it often happens that “someone who has developed a strong body and suitable mental power commits suicide under stress or poverty” while “fools with weak constitutions safely survive and leave behind children because of the power of money that enables them to employ doctors and nurses.” “Luxurious incubators” allowed even those born prematurely or with diseases to “safely reach maturity” (ibid., 220). In response to the rising numbers of the constitutionally weak that money and medicine were protecting from selection, Oka advised a program of “compulsory prohibition of procreation for those with hereditary diseases.” The model for such measures would be the actions already being carried out in “certain states of the United States of America” (ibid., 232). To those whose moral scruples might cause them to object to such measures Oka retorted sharply that such “human rights” arguments are not only “meandering” but amount to the “same as hesitating to amputate the diseased section of a gangrenous toe when rot has begun to set in, all for the sake of the rights of body cells” (ibid., 231).

Along with ego-undermining trust busting and dissent-preventing relief measures, this call to eugenics, which Oka called racial improvement, was meant ultimately to “strive to gradually promote, and, as much as possible, not abandon the spirit of cooperation and consensus” (ibid.). With no rights of their own, the “body cells” of the super-organism were dispensable: if they did not remain healthy and keep to their place they were to be discarded. Because “outside the coercive activities of the law, the ability of cooperation and consensus to work among humankind vanishes,” state initiatives are vital to keep the minzoku functioning as a healthy bio-political entity that can stave off adversaries in the struggle of existence between nations (ibid., 227).

Yet Oka never forgot that these were only “makeshift measures” to win the “battle between invalids” by delaying the inevitable. Eventually, the orthogenetic impetus toward extinction would prevail and capitalist egoism undercut the state, causing the super-organism to disintegrate from within. Oka imagined this as a process in which “self-interest and the law were in contest with one another.” The law attempts to check and contain egoism, forcing the cells of the super-organism to subsume themselves to the commonweal, but “self-interest goes through loopholes in the law, searching out and putting into practice methods that very much can be established without touching on questions of justice.” The state responds by extending its authority more and more: “in order to protect against this, minute new laws are created and perhaps the number of laws increases without limit.” Yet in the end the circumstances are those in which “with every improvement in locks the breaking of locks by robbers becomes more elaborate”: when “laws become dense and minute means develop to go through” them. Once it is unleashed “self-interest, as it always does, everywhere continues to be at work among the populace” (ibid., 227). Driven by evolution itself, this relentless force dissolves the super-organism into its constituent cells, hastening the race-nation's final extinction.

In this way, the spread of unfettered capitalism and the evolutionary decline of mankind were regarded as one and the same event. Overdeveloped brains and hands were ultimately shifting power away from the super-organism, whose interests they had evolved to promote, and toward individual persons who had hitherto also served the organic collective. The relentless pursuit of money was replacing the moral imperatives of group survival and the lesser egos of individuals were running amok. They had fashioned a world of desire in which people were suffering inhuman stress while hankering after enfeebling luxuries. This civilization was becoming so bewitched by its illusions that it was losing the impulse to reproduce and its only hope of holding off rapidly approaching extinction was to use state-power to ensure capitalist decadence would spread more slowly at home than among the more advanced race-nations abroad.

Statist Transference?

The emphasis in “The Future of Humankind” on the evolutionary ills of capitalism, which suggests Engels’ notion of a Darwinism transference of laissez-faire values on to nature – and then back again on to society, does not hold for Oka's shinkaron. As we have shown, the emergence of unbridled egoism was seen by Oka as manifesting itself in a frayed, fragmented, and internally divided ethnic nation whose myriad social problems signified a fatalistic slide into decadence and racial death. In stark contrast to what Engels might have anticipated, for Meiji Japan's foremost “Darwinian” competition between individuals – which should more fruitfully be thought of as social Spencerism – portended not progress and prosperity but their very opposite.

An intriguing question is raised by Oka's critique of laissez-faire egoism: if not capitalism, what conception of the socio-political order does Oka's shinkaron reflect? Is there some different sort of transference involved in his evolutionism, one that accounts for his hostility to egoism and his over-riding concern with the unity-as-health of the organic collective?

The answer may very well be found in the unwitting idealist inspiration of Oka's statist correctives. As we have just seen, Oka wanted the state to intervene in order to arrest the declining phase of the evolutionary life-cycle: the super-organism of the minzoku was in the process of disintegrating into its constituent individuals, but this transition into decadence could be halted, if just for a time, by state measures aimed to reverse the enervating and divisive effects of laissez-faire. This close identification of the super-organism with the state was, I would argue, no accident: the vision of the people as an organic unity developing through life-cycle phases was originally derived from a philosophical outlook that explicitly mixed statism and evolutionism. Idealist morphology was a byproduct of this idealist outlook, and it would pass these statist proclivities along to the mid- and late nineteenth-century non-Darwinian doctrines, such as evolutionary morphology and orthogenesis, that it came to inspire.Footnote ¹³ It should be no surprise that Oka, in adopting both of these doctrines, would also promote the statism inherent in their depiction of the natural world.

As was explained earlier, idealist morphology featured two elements that we have seen in Oka's “The Future of Humankind.” The first was a historicist developmentalism that depicted evolution as the differentiation of a self-developing essence through predetermined stages of growth and decay (Bowler Reference Bowler1988, chap. 4; Popper Reference Popper2002, 96–104). The second element stressed organic unities of life as the focus and culmination of this developmental process. For prominent and widely influential early nineteenth-century idealists such Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the related Romantic nature philosophers (Naturphilosophen), the unity of life that especially preoccupied them was the people (Volk) and its realization into a state. Particularly in the hands of Hegel, not only did the state take on the form of an organism but the primary threats to its internal unity were individuals who placed their private needs above state interest (Hegel Reference Hegel and Knox1967, 160, 174; Coker [1910] Reference Coker2002, 29–31; Bowler Reference Bowler2003, 101–2; Taylor Reference Taylor1975, chap. 16; Popper Reference Popper1971, chaps. 10 and 12). Through evolutionary morphology's hierarchy of organic individuality, which Haeckel explicitly linked to idealist morphology, Oka arrived at similar conclusions, depicting laissez-faire individualism in much the same light as Hegel viewed civil society – “the battlefield where everyone's individual private interest meets everyone else's” (Hegel Reference Hegel and Knox1967, 189). Consciously or not, the German-educated Oka may have been heir to an evolutionism that had long been transferring statist preoccupations on to nature. It was left to him to complete the conjurer's trick and transfer this statism back on to society.

It might be going too far to attach the name statist evolutionism to this outlook. Yet, while evolutionary morphology was not necessarily a prescription for the organic state, it cannot be denied that Oka, who would become a favorite author of Prince Hirohito (Bix Reference Bix2001, 60), was contributing in “The Future of Humankind” to a conservative tradition of idealist-inspired statist activism. This tradition was, in fact, central to the shaping of the Meiji political order. Since the early 1880s conservative Meiji bureaucratic-intellectuals had been using German historicist developmentalism to deal with the problems of unifying their newly created nation-state. Not only did a form of statist evolutionism enable them to anticipate the socio-political disruption and decay that German theorists warned always accompanied industrial capitalism, it also pointed the way toward forestalling these untoward inevitabilities by implementing idealist conceptions of the organic state. A brief recounting of how these bureaucratic elites came to use developmental and organic notions to pre-empt anticipated socio-political disintegration will help us understand Oka's critique of laissez-faire capitalism in its proper light: as part of a statist rejection of Spencerian “social Darwinism” and all it implied.

The first and foremost idealist-inspired bureaucrat was Japan's inaugural Prime Minister and principle architect of the Meiji state, Itō Hirobumi. Fearing that the promotion of the laissez-faire order of “British, French and American liberals and radicals” by the People's Rights Movement would lead to a loss of national unity and “the overthrow of the state” (Pyle 1988, 124–5), Itō visited Europe in 1882 and sat at the feet of the renowned Prussian constitutional theorists Lorenz von Stein (1815–90) and von Rudolf von Gneist (1816–95) (Martin Reference Martin1995, 33–6; Lehmbruch Reference Lehmbruch and Yamamura2001, 52–6, 60–2; Coker [1910] Reference Coker2002, 66–73; Cummings Reference Cumings and Woo-Cumings1999, 87–90). Not only did the Meiji Constitution that Itō wrote with Herman Roesler enshrine their ideas about the organic nature of the state, but their Hegelian developmentalist orientation also implanted the notion of historicist foresight: Japanese could divine their own future in developments within advanced nations and then employ this knowledge to prevent the future emergence of social problems through state-initiated programs. As with Oka's evolutionism, Itō's constitutional conservatism sought to anticipate the historical growth of the nation and “control the trends” (Pyle Reference Pyle and Wakabayashi1998, 123) through the use of pre-emptive statist measures (Pyle Reference Pyle2007, 83–86).

Complementing Itō's constitutional program in the 1880s was a full-fledged evolutionist political philosophy developed by Katō Hiroyuki, tutor to the Meiji Emperor, head of Tokyo Imperial University and the first Japanese intellectual versed in German. Rejecting the natural rights doctrine that he had helped promote in the 1870s, Katō's The Struggle for the Rights of the Strong of 1893 portrayed the Japanese nation-state as a Haeckelian super-organism (yūetsuteki yūkitai) whose further evolutionary advancement depended on the rejection of socially disruptive liberalism – natural rights and laissez-faire economics – and the continuance of firm patriarchal state leadership. As Winston Davis explains, “the egoism of the nation is naturally of a higher order than that of the individual”; therefore, for Katō, such a state could “command the sacrifice of the individual for the good of the whole.” In logic almost identical to Oka's, Katō concluded that “those who, as a result of bad heredity or maladaptations, become a threat to the state must be reformed, punished or put to death. The nation, however, cannot sacrifice itself for the good of the individual, for that would lead to anarchy and universal misery” (Davis Reference Davis1996, 38–9, 70; Abosch Reference Abosch1965; Unaura Reference Unaura and Atsuhiro1991; Ishida Reference Ishida1983, 6–7, 35, 73; Thomas Reference Thomas2001, chap. 4).Footnote ¹⁴

These conservative prescriptions for organic political unity were reinforced and given concrete definition by the dissemination of German economic thought throughout the Japanese bureaucracy from the 1890s onwards. Directly inspired by Bismarckian social policy, Kanai Noburu (1865–1933), Japan's first major academic economist and a nearly exact contemporary of Oka, returned from his student years in Germany in 1890 to introduce the doctrines of the German Historical School of Economics to the Tokyo Imperial University. Rejecting laissez-faire and its universalist presumptions, the school portrayed each nation as embodying a unique social harmony that was the outgrowth of its historical roots. Kanai echoed his German mentors in believing that preventive action on the part of the state was required to preserve this organic cohesion against the self-interested individualism, class divisions and even social revolutions that would inevitably come with the spread of industrialism and the market economy (Pyle Reference Pyle1974, 127–64; Lehmbruch Reference Lehmbruch and Yamamura2001, 62). After the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, Kanai's disciples, who had formed a widely-influential professional organization known as Shakai Seisaku Gakkai, and others, began to speak of bunmei byō or “civilization sickness” – a slogan for the shakai mondai (social problems) that plagued Western industrial societies. These problems included nearly all of the signs of orthogenetic downturn that Oka had discussed in “The Future of Humankind”: class antagonism, labor hostilities, materialism, decadence, ideological radicalism, decline of cooperativism, and the destruction of rural village life. By the turn of the century, a conservative consensus existed amongst bureaucrats that Japan's status as a late developer presented the nation with the chance to preserve the political hygiene of the organic state by acting beforehand to forestall the spread of this bunmei byō contagion (Pyle Reference Pyle and Wakabayashi1998, 129–46; Lehmbruch Reference Lehmbruch and Yamamura2001, 59–68).

This sense of impending and, indeed, unfolding crisis among the elites led to a series of state-sponsored preventive measures during the decade Oka Asajirō started to articulate his shinkaron. Bureaucrats began to reach out to notable persons across the country – village headmen, school principals, landlords, Shinto priests – to help them enact reforms intended to build national solidarity and preserve social harmony. With the assistance of these “strong middle men,” as Yamagata Aritomo called them, the bureaucracy was able to extend its administrative control over the nation and promote an “organic” collectivism even as the divisive social problems that Oka describes in “The Future of Humankind” began to be felt. Agricultural cooperatives, for instance, were formed as “communities working in behalf of the nation” (Pyle Reference Pyle and Wakabayashi1998, 138) to ensure lower classes enjoyed some degree of prosperity and did not fall prey to looming Western-style agitation. Towns and villages were consolidated to streamline administrative control over the countryside. A Factory Law was formulated and eventually enacted in 1911 to promote harmony and balance between labor and capital. Companies, some influenced by German historical social policy thought, began to develop welfare plans, in-house unions, and a firm-as-family ideology in order to short-circuit worker unrest. Youth groups, local fraternal military organizations, and other bureaucratically-fostered popular grass roots organizations were used to inculcate national loyalty and mobilize support for state economic and military projects. Finally, the myriad hamlet-level shrines across the country were merged into a top-down state shintō network through which civil servant priests assigned to central shrines located in administrative villages kept worship focused on the imperial family and national festivals (Fridell Reference Fridell1970, 823–834; Pyle Reference Pyle and Wakabayashi1998; Hardacre Reference Hardacre1989, 37–9; Gluck Reference Gluck1985, chap. 6).

Grass roots organizations and state shintō were particularly significant, for they were indicative of the underlying approach of all these preventive measures to promote and preserve the organic state: thought guidance. Bureaucrat-intellectuals who were attracted to European conservative ideas, especially those emanating from the developmental-organicist tradition described above, believed that social solidarity depended on a “positive and harmonious” social attitude free of individual egoism and class consciousness. Toward this end, Itō, Katō and the conservative elite as a whole had depicted the nation-state as a polity centered on the imperial institution, the kokutai. By the first decade of the new century – the very same non-Darwinian era when Oka began to write – this idea had been elaborated into the conception of Japan as a kazoku kokka, a family-state in which all subjects were bound by consanguineous ties and the imperial house served as paternalistic stem-line. It was this family-state ideology that would be disseminated during the early twentieth century through schools, military units, the national shrine network, and mass media (Pittau Reference Pittau1967; Wray Reference Wray1973, 69–85; Gluck Reference Gluck1985, 186–8).

According to Ishida Takeshi, kazoku kokka was consciously crafted by Meiji elites to wed the values of traditional Confucian familism to the European theory of the state as an organism. George Wilson sums up Ishida's view of this organicist family-state as follows: “the nation was one great family, a kind of perpetual organism handed on as a patrimony from emperor to emperor; state and society were a single organic whole, immune to atomistic individualism and other Western ideas. From this combination came the emperor system, Japanese imperialism, and the fascism of the Showa period” (Wilson Reference Wilson1969, 147).

Oka's shinkaron clearly offers a variation on this underlying state organism concept from the German idealist tradition – yet his version was constructed not out of political and economic theories but from doctrines of non-Darwinian evolutionism that shared common origins in this idealism. The conservative ideas that rose to the fore in the 1880s and remained a dominant feature of Japanese political life till 1945 were, in large part, a confluence of these idealist-derived political, economic, and evolutionary visions of a developmental-organicist nation-state. At their core all of these conservative doctrines were profoundly hostile not only to laissez-faire economics but to “social Darwinism” as it is usually understood.

That Oka's widely influential evolutionism fit so neatly into the idealist-inspired conservative paradigm should encourage us to address a fundamental issue: whether so-called social Darwinism ever had the impact in Japan that is sometimes imagined. As was suggested in the introduction, such social Darwinism in Japan can best be thought of as a form of social Spencerism. Spencer's laissez-faire values and his emphasis on individual competition did have an impact in Japan, but in a highly qualified manner. As Carol Gluck and Oka Yoshitake have each pointed out, individual striving for success during most of Meiji was encouraged, yet not for the sake of individuals themselves but for the family or village from whence they came. Only after the national goals of the Meiji Restoration had seemingly been achieved with the victory over Russia in 1905 did an unfettered individualism come into vogue – and even that manifestation of laissez-faire egoism mainly served to produce the late Meiji ideological reaction that we have just been describing (Gluck Reference Gluck1985, 204–12; Oka Reference Oka and Najita1982, 197–8). Thus, social Darwinism's true legacy in Japan may be not as a doctrine that transferred laissez-faire values but as a foil that facilitated the establishment of statist evolutionism among conservative elites. In Japan a trick of transference does seem to have occurred, but not the one Engels would have imagined.