Sorai Ogyū

"This volume, a monumental work of scholarship, offers for the first time in any Western language unabridged and fully annotated translations of Sorai's masterpieces. The Bendo (Distinguishing the Way) and Benmei (Distinguishing Names) are works of political philosophy that define the theoretical foundation for a leadership exercising total power, the best remedy, in Sorai's view, for a regime in crisis. The translations are based on the 1740 (Genbun 5) woodblock edition, the first major edition of these seminal texts published during the Tokugawa period.". "In his commentary, John Tucker's situates the Bendo and Benmei in relation to Neo-Confucianism via what is known as "philosophical texicography." This genre, which links Sorai's thinking with Neo-Confucianism, is traced to the early-thirteenth-century Song dynasty text the Xingli ziyi (The Meanings of Neo-Confucian Terms) by Chen Beixi (1159-1223). Although Sorai was an unrelenting critic of the Neo-Confucian formulations of the great Song synthesizer Zhu Xi (1130-1200), his thinking remained, due to its genre, methodology, and conceptual repertory, essentially a radical revision of Neo-Confucian discourse. Tuckar's introduction also examines the reception of Sorai's two Ben during the remainder of the Tokugawa, calling attention to radical tendencies in later developments of Sorai's thought as well as to the increasingly scathing critiques of his "Chinese" approach to philosophy, language, and politics. Finally, it traces the vicissitudes of the two Ben in modern Japanese intellectual history and their role in the formation of the ideas of Meiji intellectuals such as Nishi Amane (1829-1897) and Kato Hiroyuki (1836-1916)."--BOOK JACKET.

Master Sorai's Responsals was to eighteenth-century Japan what The Prince was to Renaissance Italy. Like Machiavelli, Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728) was a humanist scholar who served a prince (one of the shogun's chief lieutenants) and drew on his experiences as a house philosopher and on his vast knowledge of history and political affairs in his work. In 1720, when he began to write the letters that comprise this text, the Tokugawa regime was more than a hundred years old and beset with grave administrative and fiscal problems, about which Sorai had much to say. Samuel Yamashita's impressive translation of this work offers modern readers a rare glimpse of the prevailing political discourse of the day and the specific concepts that rulers had at their disposal as they struggled to manage their domains, find talented men for their bureaucracies, create new sources of revenue, and keep their subjects well fed and happy.