recognized along with the claims of particularism. By the time of Kamo
Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga, historical criticism itself was asserted as an
independent and in some sense overriding ground for knowledge.
It is not simply that Neo-Shintoism had to be raised from inchoate roots
into a formal doctrine in the intellectual attention space. Its intellectual sub-
stance was created in the process of scholarly accumulation over the genera-
tions of sustained argument. And it rested more specifically on the differentia-
tion of scholarly specialists, first in received Chinese texts, then going on to
explore classical and then national antiquity in a fashion that parallels the
European sequence of medieval Neoplatonists and Aristoteleans, Renaissance
Humanists, and eventually the Romanticist-nationalist scholars of the 1700s.
The fact that the Göttingen school of philologists, along with Winckelmann
and the brothers Grimm, were contemporaries of the secularists of the French
Enlightenment should not surprise us; we see the same pattern in Japan, where
secularist-naturalist and antiquarian-nationalist movements were contempo-
raries, and even network cousins. This is not a matter of intellectual life
proceeding in cyclical reactions; rather, creative periods are always structured
by contemporary oppositions. There is a common denominator on the level of
underlying organizational bases: in both Japan and Europe these movements
rest on the expansion of a cultural marketplace, combining literary publication
and formal schooling. Modern conservatism everywhere arises from the secu-
larization of society—in the sense of the declining institutional weight of
religion—and the emergence of an autonomous educational system.^45
Japanese neoconservatism is a phenomenon of modernity. To be sure, the
political weight that it acquired in the overall balance of factions is almost
unique and must be accounted for by conditions specific to Japan. But modern
European history is not without its neoconservative and past-extolling ideolo-
gies, constructed precisely with the intellectual tools of modern sophistication.
There is a more general lesson. Conservatism as an ideology is always a
deception. There is no such thing as an appeal to the unreconstructed past.
The very concepts of tradition and of particularistic faith echo the antitheses
by which they were shaped. Conservatism, like everything else in the intellec-
tual world, is born out of conflict. And even when the combination of relig-
ious-political alliance with an authoritarian regime would seem to make any
innovation in the realm of ideas illegitimate, innovation is not choked off.
As soon as organizational conditions are assembled for sizable bodies of
literate specialists to communicate about their affairs, the inherent fractiona-
tion of the intellectual attention space generates differences in emphasis. These
are constructed out of whatever accumulated textual material is available. It
matters not that the texts themselves may be ancient and particularistic, or
that their overt content may adamantly assert immutability and oppose inno-368 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths