Law and Society in Imperial Japan: Suehiro Izutaro and the Search ...

farther from the legal customs of Japan than Hozumi’s insistence on the symmetry between society and law.

The “constant law” that Hozumi sought was the neo-Darwinian principle according to which law (and society) developed by fixed stages.¹⁷ Many thinkers in Japan, Europe, and the Americas had long seen society as analogous to the human body,¹⁸ and Hozumi was no exception. For Hozumi, society was an “organic body, whose mechanism never rested for even an instant.”¹⁹ “Law is one form of societal force,” Hozumi declared. “When law is observed over time, it becomes clear that it must needs be in a state of permanent flux.”²⁰ At stake was jurisprudential anthropology: whether law would see society as a community of individuals bearing inalienable rights or as a phalanx of citizen-subjects subordinate to the demands of the state, locked in an existential evolutionary struggle with other states in the Spencerian geopolitical order.

This turn to the neo-Darwinian was prominent in other Japanese intellectuals’ views of their country and region, as well. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), for example, appropriated François Guizot’s (1787–1874) schema of the development of European civilization to write Outline of a Theory of Civilization (Bunmeiron no gairyaku) (1875), which posits a three-stage progression of civilizations from barbarism through semi-enlightenment to, finally, civilization. While Guizot putatively indexes these criteria to the degree of individual autonomy within a given civilization, Fukuzawa ends his book by advocating that civilized states engage in conquest. Fuzuzawa’s later works largely rejected his initial emphasis on natural rights and focus instead on the prerogatives of the state.²¹

However, over and against this Hegelian notion of the progression of states was the Rousseauian conception of natural rights, according to which, in its Lockean iteration, men formed a society only for their own protection and retained the right to dissolve that society. For the Spencerians in Japan, the Rousseauian vision of atomistic liberalism was particularly threatening, as it seemed to carry the potential to weaken