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

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and Sir Henry James Sumner Maine (1822–1888).¹⁰ After this exposure to the works of these philosophers of John Stuart Mill-style liberalism in, respectively, biology, society, and law, Hozumi combined all three into one overarching theory that law and society were subsets of biology, and therefore fundamentally evolutionary and subject to the same laws of natural selection as were found in nature. Hozumi thereafter “resolved to make it his life’s work to apply evolutionary theory to human society.”¹¹ In his incomplete three-volume magnum opus, On Legal Evolution (Hōritsu shinkaron),¹² Hozumi developed themes found in his (also unfinished) Legal Evolutionism (Hōritsu shinkashugi) and Jurisprudential Revolution (Hōritsugaku no kakumei).¹³ The titles of the trilogy—from evolution to evolutionism to revolution—give some idea of the beeline progression of Hozumi’s neo-Darwinian thought.

The programmatic evolution of Hozumi’s legal philosophy was predicated upon the supremacy of the state (kokka) over the individual. This, in turn, was made possible by the very divorce between law and society that Hozumi and many other Japanese legal thinkers thought they were working to repair. The organizing principle for the new nation of “Japan” had to be the state, Hozumi believed. It was in the vehicle of the state that Japan as a nation would survive the Darwinian contest. In particular, Hozumi was concerned with re-founding the Japanese state on the “new traditions” of the Meiji reformulation of Japanese society. A Japan strong in society and in custom—even if hastily assembled—was the sine qua non of living through an age of rampant neo-colonialism. Hozumi’s opposition to the importation of liberal individualism into Japan, for example, was based upon his stanch belief in a rigid Darwinian social model wherein societies lock in pitiless competition for survival on the global stage. Hozumi’s attempt to fix social castes as a way to shore up Japan against foreign threats was the conduit for the importation of a totalizing abstract political and legal conceptualization antithetical to the earlier Ōoka style of prudential equity.