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Keiichi Matsushita’s Mass Society Theory:
A Case of Leftist Democratic Theory in Post-War Japan
Ryusaku Yamada, Ph.D.
Associate Professor in Politics
Nihon University College of International Relations
Arguments about “mass society” could be found universally in Western industrialized
countries with many varieties from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s. However, the
Japanese arguments in the 1950s had a unique character. The reason lies in the fact that
Marxism overwhelmingly influenced modern Japanese social sciences since the 1920s. This
does not mean that all Japanese social scientists were Marxists, but it is also true that, between
the era before the Second World War and around the 1960s, both Marxists and non-Marxists in
Japan tended to share the basic understanding that social science is Marxism, or that Marxism
established a genuine social science. The influence of Marxism over Japanese social sciences
became weak at the end of the 1960s and was minimized in the 1980s. But, during the 1950s,
the academic atmosphere was dominated by the feeling that they could not say anything
without Marxism. And what was remarkable is that the “Debate on Mass Society” in 1956
and 1957 was carried on between theorists of mass society and Marxists in Japan.
The central figure of the “Debate” was Keiichi Matsushita (1928- ), a Japanese political
theorist. There are several reasons why Matsushita’s theory of mass society is worth being known
to English-speaking world today.
First, his theory was of highly Marxian kind. While he
himself was not a Marxist and was very critical of Stalinist Marxism, he regarded theories by
Marx and Lenin as social theories of industrial society and repeatedly identified their
significance in theorizing about “contemporary society” in the twentieth century. While
many Western theorists of mass society tended to describe mass society as an amorphous
“classless society”,
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Matsushita did not deny the capitalistic class relationship but built
Marxian class theory in his mass society theory. Such theory of mass society seems quite
Convention