From “Governance” to “Economy”: Kaiho Seiryō’s Reconstruction of the Sorai School’s Statecraft Thought

Abstract

The Sorai school was a Confucian school founded by Ogyū Sorai during Japan’s Edo period. This school formed a lineage of succession from “Ogyū Sorai – Dazai Shundai – Kaiho Seiryō” in the mid-to-late Tokugawa period. In the 18th century Edo period, as the commodity economy impacted the feudal system, the statecraft thought within the Sorai school underwent a profound transformation from political “governance” to profit-oriented “economy”. Ogyū Sorai, with “order” and “foundation” at his core, constructed a system emphasizing agriculture and suppressing commerce, wherein politics governed economics. He advocated maintaining the feudal order through institutions such as “returning warriors to agriculture” and “hierarchical consumption”, with economic policies serving political stability. Dazai Shundai, characterized by “equilibrium” and “preservation”, proposed pragmatic measures such as the ever-normal granary and unified currency system in pursuit of social equilibrium, achieving a transition from moral idealism to economic governance. Kaiho Seiryō ultimately completed a paradigm revolution, demonstrating “profit” as “heavenly principle”, reconstructing social relations through the “ruler-minister market principle”, and completely shifting to profit-oriented mercantilism. This evolutionary trajectory not only reflects Confucianism’s self-renewal in response to practical challenges but also reveals the intellectual impetus for Japan’s early modern society’s transition from pre-modern to modern times, laying an essential foundation for the intellectual enlightenment preceding the Meiji Restoration.