The first article in this issue provides a carefully contextualized reinterpretation of the Kyoto School's understanding of world history, engaging with significant changes in the history of ideas about history and nation in Japan during and after the war. As Brian Hurley points out, scholarly attention has rightly focused on the Kyoto School's war-era invocation of heroic struggle, sacrifice, and triumphalism to justify the purifying violence of empire, the way in which this was connected to a sense of world history's inevitability, and the place of imperial Japan at the center of that history. Much less well known is how intellectuals closely associated with the Kyoto School engaged in a postwar reconsideration not just of Japan's place in an emerging new world order but of history more broadly, and of the place of ideology and cultural diversity within a framework of liberal, ecumenical, democratic modernity.
As Hurley points...
