The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

Alexis de Tocqueville is often described as a critic of American culture and modern democracy. Yet, as Alan Levine argues, there is an important difference between Tocqueville’s friendly criticisms of parts of American culture he finds wanting and other ideological critiques by “anti-American” thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and the Frankfurt School. Several factors separate Tocqueville from this European tradition of “Anti-Americanism.” Tocqueville’s criticisms are balanced by an appreciation of the virtues of American democracy and a recognition that these defects are hardly unique to America. His criticisms also take their root in empirical considerations of the complexities of American culture. Although the Frankfurt School and other influential critics often claim Tocqueville as inspiration for their complaints about mass society, they are ideologically motivated, ignore America’s redeeming virtues, and fault America uniquely for widely shared flaws of modernity.

The second chapter of this volume focusses on crowds, both conceptually and historically. The study of crowd influence has waxed and waned over the years and has seen a resurgence of interest in topics such as identity-based social movements, street action and social media. The chapter traces this line of inquiry to the mass psychology of LeBon and Tarde, who conceived of crowds as a powerful social force that compromises Rationality and Civilisation and leads to a 'mass society' dominated by charismatic leaders. Tarde’s laws of imitation extended this inquiry of physical crowds in public spaces to that of distributed public opinion of news readers with a shared focus of attention. These notions have corollaries with contemporary theories of agenda setting, collective attention cycles, crowd sourcing and intelligence, memes and viral beliefs, stock market bubbles and social media dynamics. Much of theory of crowds oscillates between positive and negative moral assessments. The chapter concludes by considering the role of social identification in the dynamics of crowds which distributes human cognition among individual actors and determines the relationship with the leader.

Citizens are civic friends when they agree about the regime, their political system. In liberal democracies there is agreement about the regime, or at least about its presuppositions: freedom and equality. This insight is simple but profound because regimes are self-perpetuating: they mold citizens into a recognizable type, such as the type that loves freedom and equality. Citizens tend to like this type of person—the type they themselves belong to. A “thin” agreement is the core of Aristotle’s teaching on civic friendship. For his immediate audience, he wanted more. Although his best-practicable regime leaves out many features of his best regime, civic friendship is a critical feature. Civic friendship has been transformed by federalism, by modern communications, more recently by the internet and social media. But “the Greek polis was small enough for everyone to be friends” is a modern mistake forgetting that civic friendship is an analogy. We cannot have many friends, Aristotle says, “except in the civic sense.”