Secrets of the Modern World: Yukichi Fukuzawa

MacFarlane, Alan, Professor

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Alan Macfarlane writes:<p>

Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901) is arguably the greatest Japanese social thinker of the last three centuries, yet he is little known outside his native country, except to experts on Japan. Contemporaries, on the other hand, recognized his eminence and influence.<p>

The dialogue with Fukuzawa has a somewhat different purpose from that with earlier thinkers of the western Enlightenment treated in my previous work. The work of Montesquieu, Smith and Tocqueville, when combi