Maruyama Lectures Occasional Papers
- Introduction
- Two Lectures by Kenzaburo Oe, April 1999
- Two Lectures by Tetsuo Najita, April 2000
- Two Lectures by John Dunn, April 2001
- Two Lectures by Carol Gluck, April 2004
- Two Lectures by Alan Macfarlane, October 2005
Two Lectures by John Dunn, April 2001
Lecture: The Road to Political Paralysis: A Democratic Hope Mislaid
Who is responsible for Japan's current state of political paralysis? How can we conceive of political responsibility in a democracy, where agency is diffused throughout the population? Maruyama's attempt to answer these questions for his own time was unique in its awareness that any conception of democracy must confront the horrors of politics, which we can neither justify nor repudiate, but for which we are all ultimately responsible. John Dunn offers his own perspective on Japan's current political crisis as he considers the problems and possibilities offered for approaching them by Maruyama's vision of postwar democracy as a "community of contrition."
Seminar: Subject to the Sphinx: Capitalist Democracy as Solution and Enigma
What have we come to subject ourselves to by accepting capitalist democracy as the only viable means of political incorporation in the world today? Why has this state form spread as widely and as quickly as it has? Dunn's discussion examines the economic, ideological, and organizational dimensions of the spread of capitalist democracy in order to expose the difficulties in thinking about political responsibility in the modern world.