明治時代におけるホイッグ史観の受容

書誌事項

タイトル別名
  • メイジ ジダイ ニ オケル ホイッグ シカン ノ ジュヨウ
  • The Introduction of the Whig Interpretation of History into Meiji Japan

この論文をさがす

抄録

This is a sequel to my two previous articles, "Japanese Views on the English Revolution in the Meiji Era", (Publications of the Institute for Comparative Studies of Culture, Vol. 26, 1968) and "Japanese Views on Puritanism in the Meiji Era" (Ibid., Vol. 32, 1972). In the former articles, I made surveys on books which contributed to develop Japanese understanding of the Revolution in the 17 th century England and then I laid stress on the point that the knowledge of the English Revolution in Meiji Japan was an adaptation of the Whig interpretation of British history to the Japanese political situation of the time. From this point of view, to know how this interpretation of British history was introduced into Meiji Japan would be one of the essential problems, but it is strange enough that we cannot find out in the Meiji era any translation of the most important historical book of the school, T. B. Macaulay's History of England. In his autobiography, Sohd Tokutomi, the leader of the Minyu-sha group and later days ultra-nationalist, remembered his enthusiastic reading of Macaulay's Essays and History in his youth. We can easily perceive that his early writings were deeply influenced by Macaulay's interpretation of history, because Tokutomi not only shared the optimistic progressivism with him but also used such clear-cut two-polars conceptions as good and evil, liberty and tyranny and so on. In 1890 the first Japanese biography of Macaulay was written by Yosaburo Takekoshi, one of Tokutomi's partners, but though being a good introduction to Macaulay's personality and achivements, this biography clearly depicts him as a historian who wrote history with an excellent literary talent but undeservedly neglects to consider the significance of his logics. This one-sidedness of the introduction of Whig interpretation has cast its shadow over the Japanese understanding of British historiography.

収録刊行物

詳細情報 詳細情報について

問題の指摘

ページトップへ