日時：2023年9月12日（火）15時～16時40分

場所：オンライン（Zoom）

参加方法：所外の方はこちらのお申込フォームからお申込ください。前日にZoomのURLを送付いたします。

(申込締切日：9月11日 16:00)

報告要旨

In this talk, I argue that the normative framework of state legitimation in non-democratic regimes can accommodate a significant amount of popular engagement with the authorities. I distinguish two types of political participation, both of which are justified by the performance-based state legitimation yet which have quite different natures. One involves the provision of particular public goods or expression of specific welfare grievances, which does not necessarily lead to more fundamental political demands, even in well-organized and large-scale collective petitions. The other is related to general issues of public interest other than material welfare, such as religion and national dignity, which can mobilize actors across the society to participate. Both forms of negotiating with the state rest upon the passive rights entailed by the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation, which is different from active rights held independent of the state.

However, the latter type of political activity can trigger demands for fundamental political reforms. Issues of public good not related to domestic welfare, such as the “true Christianity,” in England after 1640 and the “national dignity” of Japan after 1858, could mobilize cross-country collective petitions involving state politics so as to defend Reformation in England or the “national honor” in Japan. These collective petitions were justified by the duty of the state to safeguard the public interest. The tension between public interest in domestic welfare and intangible issues of religion and national honor yielded to serious debates over the purpose of the public finance: for international power struggles or for domestic welfare. Such tension instigated cross-national collective petitions for fundamental political reforms, as seen in the associations movement in England in 1780 that demanded Parliamentary reforms and the petitions to establish a parliament in Japan in the 1880s. China between 1840 and 1911 was a negative case to demonstrate that grievances of specific domestic welfare in the absence of issues of intangible public good would not mobilize cross-regional petitions for fundamental political reforms.

関連書籍

Public Interest and State Legitimation; Early Modern England, Japan, and China

Wenkai He

September 2023

How were state formation and early modern politics shaped by the state’s proclaimed obligation to domestic welfare? Drawing on a wide range of historical scholarship and primary sources, this book demonstrates that a public interestbased discourse of state legitimation was common to early modern England, Japan, and China. This normative platform served as a shared basis on which state and society could negotiate and collaborate over how to attain good governance through providing public goods such as famine relief and infrastructural facilities. The terms of state legitimacy opened a limited yet significant political space for the ruled. Through petitioning and protests, subordinates could demand that the state fulfil its publicly proclaimed duty and redress welfare grievances. Conflicts among diverse dimensions of public interest mobilized cross-regional and cross-sectoral collective petitions; justified by the same norms of state legitimacy, these petitions called for fundamental political reforms and transformed the nature of politics.

Introduction;
Part I:
1. Legitimacy and resilience of the early modern state;
2. State-society collaboration against subsistence crisis;
3. Financing public infrastructure;
4. The negotiation of state and society over redress of grievances;
Part II.
Prologue: Limits to Early Modern State Resilience;
5. A political ‘great divergence': England (1640–1780), Japan (1853–1895) and China (1840–1911);
Conclusion: toward a contextualized comparative historical analysis.