After Armitage lecture at Sophia

After the lecture, we went to "Kuraya" for dinner.
S, Prof. Hosokawa from Kagoshima, Kenryu
Endo-san, D. Armitage, Juro at the dinner table:

The lecture attracted a large audience in spite of our scheduling
on Friday evening. It was quite stimulating for his brilliant
contextualization of the Declaration of Independence as an
international text had impressed many. He did not like my reading
of the document with a 'pacifist' dimension. He takes the first and
the last paragraphs as the most important statements in the document
as the international proclamation of independence legally, economically,
and politically; whereas my attention goes to the second paragraph with
"rights, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. " I may substitute "pursuite
of happiness" with "pursuite of (self) happiness (and interests)."

When I consider Jefferson's aristocratic entrepreneur background as
well as the backgrounds of those who signed the Declaration, I have a
slight problem on taking it as a politically "radical" proclamation of
the "people" of the colonies. Especially when I read Jefferson's
explanation on drafting the document in his Autobiography, I have
some reservations in interpreting the document as a politically
radical international statement. -- I wonder how serious they were
when the colonial leaders accused George III as the sole cause of
all the evils in the colonies. Refraining from directly accusing
the "people" of the mother country, as Jefferson explained, and
blaming the king as the sole initiater of the evil deeds, did not
the colonial leaders try to keep 'peace' with the English "people"
in the Declaration even in the crisis of war?

Gordon Wood once stated that he had doubts on Jefferson's
explanation in the Autobiography on striking out the slavery issue
because of the rejection from Carolina and Georgia. (Du Bois Institute
lecture in 2004) Wood considered that those two colonies were too
small to influence the Committee to strike out the passage. Wood read
Jefferson and Virginian planters self-motivated economical interests
in slavery behind the striking out of the passage. I thought Wood's
reading was quite persuasive in contextualizing the document in its
American colonial historical setting. I wonder how such a domestic
close reading of the document reconciles with Armitage's reading of it
as an international and global document. There seems to be a
danger of a-historicizing the historical text if you focus on one function
as a liberating text in the global history from 18th to the 21st century.
The document becomes one type which represents many such texts.

Anyway, the document's importance and crucial influence is
non-debatable. We are quite fortunate to have hosted a stimulative
intellectual from Harvard on Friday evening. The conversation at the
dinner table was vibrant indeed thanks to the other participating
scholars from all over Japan.