|
by: Douglas Howland
Amazon.com's Price: $58.00 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 323.44
EAN: 9780802090058
ISBN: 0802090052
Label: University of Toronto Press
Manufacturer: University of Toronto Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 200
Publication Date: November 05, 2005
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Sales Rank: 1746395
Studio: University of Toronto Press
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Blame for the putative failure of liberalism in late-nineteenth-century Japan and China has often been placed on an insufficient grasp of modernity among East Asian leaders or on their cultural commitments to traditional values. In Personal Liberty and Public Good, Douglas Howland refutes this view, turning to the central text of liberalism in that era: John Stuart Mill?s On Liberty.
Howland offers absorbing analyses of the translations of the book into Japanese and Chinese, which at times reveal astonishing emendations. As with their political leaders, Mill?s Japanese and Chinese translators feared individual liberty could undermine the public good and standards for public behaviour, and so introduced their own moral values ? Christianity and Confucianism, respectively? into On Liberty, filtering its original meaning. Howland mirrors this mistrust of individual liberty in Asia with critiques of the work in England, which itself had trouble adopting liberalism.
Personal Liberty and Public Good is a compelling addition to the corpus of writing on the work of John Stuart Mill. It will be of great interest to historians of political thought, liberalism, and translation, as well as scholars of East Asian studies.
|
