Harry D. Harootunian

"In the decades between the two World Wars, Japan made a dramatic entry into the modern age, expanding its capital industries and urbanizing so quickly as to rival many long-standing Western industrial societies. How the Japanese made sense of the sudden transformation and the subsequent rise of mass culture is the focus of Harry Harootunian's fascinating inquiry into the problems of modernity. Here he examines the work of a generation of Japanese intellectuals who, like their European counterparts, saw modernity as a spectacle of ceaseless change that uprooted the dominant historical culture from its fixed values and substituted a culture based on fantasy and desire. Harootunian not only explains why the Japanese valued philosophical understandings of these events, often over sociological or empirical explanations, but also locates Japan's experience of modernity within a larger global process marked by both modernism and fascism.". "Harootunian shows that Japanese and European intellectuals shared many of the same concerns and also stresses that neither Japan's involvement with fascism nor its late entry into the capitalist, industrial scene should cause historians to view its experience of modernity as an oddity. The author argues that strains of fascism ran throughout most every country in Europe and in many ways resulted from modernizing trends in general. This book, written by a leading scholar of modern Japan, amounts to a major interpretation of the nature of Japan's modernity."--BOOK JACKET.

This anthology brings together thirteen major essays by leading scholars and researchers in multiple fields across the sciences and humanities. In addition, each essay is accompanied by a never-before-published critical response and a rejoinder by the author of the original essay.

"Empire and imperialism have returned with a vengeance - not as a set of ideas and practices to be exhumed by the historians, but as paradigms for 21st-century living. Harry Harootunian turns his gaze to signs of the new imperialism in the world - from the United States' occupation of Iraq to supposed terrorist enclaves around the globe." "The arguments being made today for imperialism's historical and contemporary value echo earlier rationales for modernization theory and its conception of "development" during the heyday of the Cold War. Harootunian cuts through the layers to reveal that under the new clothes, it's the same empire."--Jacket.