Medicine and the Body Politic: An Approach to the Global History of Political Thought

Dr Takashi Shogimen
Marsden Fast Start Project, 2006-2008

Western political rhetoric has been full of organic metaphors and medical analogies: criminals are to be ‘amputated’ from the community, and money circulates in the body politic just like the blood in the body natural. No attempt has ever been made to explore the influence that the growing medical knowledge exercised on the past conceptualisations of the body politic. This is a significant gap in modern historical scholarship, especially when it is considered that some leading political thinkers including Marsilius of Padua and John Locke were physicians by training. But lessons from the body were not unique to Western Europe; some Japanese political thinkers were well versed in medicine and physicians commented on politics. Tokugawa Japan (1602-1867) witnessed the burgeoning of medicine inspired first by classical Chinese medicine and later by Western science, which, in turn, analogically influenced the Japanese conceptualisation of the body politic. This study highlights the hitherto overlooked impact of medical knowledge on the conceptions of the body politic and government in medieval and early modern Europe and Tokugawa Japan from an inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, thereby contributing towards a globally integrated historical narrative of political thought.

Publications

• Medicine and the Body Politic in Medieval Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, under contract) Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia, eds. Takashi Shogimen and Cary J. Nederman (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, 2008)
• Political Diagnostics: An Introduction (in Japanese), (Tokyo: Kodansha Publishers, 2006)
• ‘Treating the Body Politic: The Medical Metaphor of Political Rule in Late Medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan’, The Review of Politics 70 (2008): 77-104
• ‘Imagining the Body Politic: Metaphor and Political Language in Late Medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan’, Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia, eds. Shogimen and Nederman, 279-300.
• ‘”Head or Heart?” Revisited: Physiology and Political Thought in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,’ History of Political Thought, 28 (2007): 208-229.
• ‘Medicine and the Body Politic in Marsilius of Padua’a Defensor pacis’, in Cary J. Nederman and Gerson Moreno-Riaño, eds., A Companion to Marsilius of Padua, (Leiden: E. J. Brill, forthcoming)