Richard J Samuels
Biographic Data
| ID | 284548 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard J Samuels |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard J |
| FAMILY NAME | Samuels |
| SIGNATURE | SAMUELS R J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1490-8194 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 133 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
A strengthened argument for realism about numbers
Kidnapping politics: The sorcerer’s apprentice effect
Elected leaders often manipulate public emotions during kidnapping crises to advance political goals, yet they can also become trapped by the very ‘captivity passions’ they stoke. We call this the sorcerer’s apprentice effect, after Goethe’s tale, to capture a recurring pattern in democracies across time and cultures. Politicised captivity arises in contexts of interstate conflict or terrorism, where the seizure of individuals triggers a volatile…
Kidnapping politics: Captivity passions and international security
Here we introduce the nine research articles assembled in this special issue. Together they explore the implications for foreign policy and international security of the forced deprivation of individuals’ freedom by state or non-state actors for political advantage – what we and our authors call ‘politicised captivity’. Despite its ubiquity, politicised captivity has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention. Although some research explor…
Restricted nominalism about number and its problems
Hofweber ( Ontology and the ambitions of metaphysics , Oxford University Press, 2016) argues for a thesis he calls “internalism” with respect to natural number discourse: no expressions purporting to refer to natural numbers in fact refer, and no apparent quantification over natural numbers actually involves quantification over natural numbers as objects. He argues that while internalism leaves open the question of whether other kinds of abstract…
Pushing on an Open Door: Japan’s Evolutionary Security Posture
At the 2022 Shangri-La Dialogue, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned defense ministers from across the Indo-Pacific region that “Ukraine today may be East Asia tomorrow.” Russia’s war of aggression and China’s tacit support for the invasion have amplified the urgency of the threat posed by China’s economic and military rise and have informed material changes to Japanese defense policy
Computability, Notation, and de re Knowledge of Numbers
Saul Kripke once noted that there is a tight connection between computation and de re knowledge of whatever the computation acts upon. For example, the Euclidean algorithm can produce knowledge of which number is the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Arguably, algorithms operate directly on syntactic items, such as strings, and on numbers and the like only via how the numbers are represented. So we broach matters of notation. The purpose of…
Delusions and madmen: Against rationality constraints on belief
Japanese Foreign Intelligence and Grand Strategy: From the Cold War to the Abe Era
Vulnerable US Alliances in Northeast Asia: The Nuclear Implications
Despite rising threats and challenges in Northeast Asia, the US commitment to its allies there has become less certain. In part, this is by design. President Trump argued that less categorical sign
Hale’s argument from transitive counting
The Business of the Japanese State: Energy Markets in Comparative and Historical Perspective
Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters
The Japanese people were promised much—too much, it turned out—in the immediate aftermath of the triple catastrophes that struck northeastern Japan in March 2011. Everything from public safety to national politics and social policy would be fixed, reborn, renewed, revitalized, transformed, reconstructed, and renovated. Daniel P. Aldrich, a specialist on postdisaster resiliency and controversial siting decisions, has produced a tidy evaluation of …
Securing Japan: Tokyo's Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia
For the past sixty years, the U.S. government has assumed that Japan's security policies would reinforce American interests in Asia. The political and military profile of Asia is changing rapidly, however. Korea's nuclear program, China's rise, and the relative decline of U.S. power have commanded strategic review in Tokyo just as these matters have in Washington. What is the next step for Japan's security policy? Will confluence with U.S. intere…
Could emotion development really be the acquisition of emotion concepts
Emotion development research centrally concerns capacities to produce emotions and to think about them. We distinguish these enterprises and consider a novel account of how they might be related. On one recent account, the capacity to have emotions of various kinds comes by way of the acquisition of emotion concepts. This account relies on a constructionist theory of emotions and an embodied theory of emotion concepts. We explicate these elements…
Active Denial: Redesigning Japan's Response to China's Military Challenge
The growth of Chinese military power poses significant challenges to Japan. China's military spending, which was half that of Japan's in 1996, is now three and a half times as large. Japan has taken a range of measures to buttress its military forces and loosen the restrictions on their operations, but much remains to be done. Most important, Tokyo needs to reexamine its strategy to maximize Japan's deterrent leverage. Of the three general approa…
Introduction: Japan's pivot in Asia
When we first conceived this project in early 2015, it had already become clear that Japan had started to diversify its strategic relationships and to explore pathways towards greater strategic independence. Tokyo's complex relations with China and the United States—its two most important bilateral relationships—were fraught with knotty, albeit different, problems. Relations with China, the rapidly emerging power just offshore, were often charact…
Japan's National Security Council: Filling the Whole of Government
The creation of the National Security Council (NSC) in 2013 was part of the most ambitious reorganization of Japan's foreign and security policy apparatus since the end of the Pacific War in 1945. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe aimed to create a ‘Strategic Headquarters’ to better coordinate Japanese grand strategy across a fissiparous bureaucracy and political class. The formation of the NSC is a potential watershed in Japanese strategic policy-making…
Irrationality: Philosophical Aspects
Japan’s Nuclear Hedge: Beyond “Allergy” and Breakout
JAPANESE STRATEGISTS HAVE LONG BEEN AMBIVALENT about nuclear weapons. On the one hand, memories of horrific nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have sustained antinuclear sentiment and helped justify national policies championing nonproliferation and forgoing an indigenous nuclear arsenal. This “nuclear allergy” has been diagnosed as a genetic condition, and associated institutional and diplomatic constraints on nuclear breakout have been i…
Comparative and Historical Lessons
Like all catastrophes, 3.11 generated pain and imagination, heroes and villains. Political entrepreneurs with motivation and resources were quick to do battle for control of the event. They spun narrative explanations for the tragedy across a broad horizon of meanings and values, all conforming to their own preexisting preferences and to what they believed would be effective with the Japanese public. Existing enemies were enemies still, but newly…
Japan’s Rhetoric of Crisis: Prospects for Change after 3.11
For some Japanese political entrepreneurs, the March 2011 catastrophe in Tohoku (3.11) was a warning for Japan to “put it in gear” and head in a new direction—away from nuclear power or toward a muscular military. For others, 3.11 was a once-in-a-millennium “black swan,” so Japan should “stay the course.” Still others say Japan must rebuild what was lost to modernity and globalization. The battle among these perspectives on change and the use of …
Massive Modularity
The objective of the article is to discuss the evolution, hypothesis, and some the more prominent arguments for massive modularity (MM). MM is the hypothesis that the human mind is largely or entirely composed from a great many modules. Modules are functionally characterizable cognitive mechanisms that tend to possess several features, which include domain-specificity, informationally encapsulation, innateness, inaccessibility, shallow outputs, a…
Kidnapping Politics in East Asia
In this article, I examine two contemporary cases in which the same foreign adversary, North Korea (DPRK), violated the sovereignty of neighboring states. I use a comparison of South Korean and Japanese reactions to political captivity to assess institutional performance in democratic states and ways in which these dynamics are connected to international politics. We see how “captivity narratives” can be differentially constructed and deployed an…
Crisis and Innovation in Asian Technology
Prosperity's Children: Generational Change and Japan's Future Leadership
This study measures generational differences in the views of Japanese legislators across three key areas of Japan's political discourse—economic policy, security policy, and cultural issues related to right-wing nationalism. The study then explores the policy implications of these differences through three plausible midterm scenarios
Machiavelli's children: Leaders and their legacies in Italy and Japan
"In this book about leadership and historical choices, Richard J. Samuels emphasizes the role of human ingenuity in political change. He draws on interviews and archival research in a fascinating series of paired biographies of political and business leaders from Italy and Japan.". "Beginning with the founding of modern nation-states after the Meiji Restoration and the Risorgimento, Samuels traces the developmental dynamic in both countries throu…
Evolutionary Psychology and the Massive Modularity Hypothesis
In recent years evolutionary psychologists have developed and defended the Massive Modularity Hypothesis, which maintains that our cognitive architecture—including the part that subserves ‘central processing’ —is largely or perhaps even entirely composed of innate, domain-specific computational mechanisms or ‘modules’. In this paper I argue for two claims. First, I show that the two main arguments that evolutionary psychologists have offered for …
Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition
List of contributors Preface 1. Introduction Peter Carruthers and Andrew Chamberlain 2. Massively modular minds: evolutionary psychology and cognitive architecture Richard Samuels 3. Individual differences in early understanding of mind: genes, non-shared environment and modularity Claire Hughes and Robert Plomin 4. Darwin in the madhouse: evolutionary psychology and the classification of mental disorders Dominic Murphy and Stephen Stich 5. Evolu…
The Politics of Regional Policy in Japan
Securing Japan: Tokyo's Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia
For the past sixty years, the U.S. government has assumed that Japan's security policies would reinforce American interests in Asia. The political and military profile of Asia is changing rapidly, however. Korea's nuclear program, China's rise, and the relative decline of U.S. power have commanded strategic review in Tokyo just as these matters have in Washington. What is the next step for Japan's security policy? Will confluence with U.S. intere…
Japan's Dual Hedge
LAST FALL, just eight days after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, announced that his country would provide military support to the United States for the war in Afghanistan. His statement seemed to signal a long-awaited shift in Japan's foreign and security policy. Stung by criticism that it had hesitated to lend a hand during the Persian Gulf War, this time Japan quickly declared s…
Mercantile Realism and Japanese Foreign Policy
Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-57)
Mercantile Realism and Japanese Foreign Policy
April 01 1998 Mercantile Realism and Japanese Foreign Policy Eric Heginbotham, Eric Heginbotham Eric Heginbotham is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Richard J. Samuels Richard J. Samuels Richard J. Sarnuels is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and Director of the MIT-Japan Program. Sear…
Active Denial: Redesigning Japan's Response to China's Military Challenge
The growth of Chinese military power poses significant challenges to Japan. China's military spending, which was half that of Japan's in 1996, is now three and a half times as large. Japan has taken a range of measures to buttress its military forces and loosen the restrictions on their operations, but much remains to be done. Most important, Tokyo needs to reexamine its strategy to maximize Japan's deterrent leverage. Of the three general approa…
Comparing Theories of Democratic Support: Lessons from Post-Communist Europe
This article sets out to evaluate the dominant approaches that are used to explain democratic support with a particular interest in what can be learned from the case of post-communist Europe. The main argument is that the case of post-communist Europe illustrates the weakness of the dominant sociological and instrumental approaches. In post-communist Europe democratic support does not depend on a familiarity with democratic institutions and norms…
Introduction: Japan's pivot in Asia
When we first conceived this project in early 2015, it had already become clear that Japan had started to diversify its strategic relationships and to explore pathways towards greater strategic independence. Tokyo's complex relations with China and the United States—its two most important bilateral relationships—were fraught with knotty, albeit different, problems. Relations with China, the rapidly emerging power just offshore, were often charact…
Tracking democracies: Italy and Japan in historical perspective
The Italian and Japanese roads toward democracy have been paved by external forces, by the timing of economic development, by ‘great’ leaders and by such factors as institutions, class structure, geography and even by accident. In finding a pair of countries where so much is similar, and yet where fundamental differences penist, comparativists have fertile ground in which to look for key factors in political (and democratic) change. This article,…
Vulnerable US Alliances in Northeast Asia: The Nuclear Implications
Despite rising threats and challenges in Northeast Asia, the US commitment to its allies there has become less certain. In part, this is by design. President Trump argued that less categorical sign
Could emotion development really be the acquisition of emotion concepts
Emotion development research centrally concerns capacities to produce emotions and to think about them. We distinguish these enterprises and consider a novel account of how they might be related. On one recent account, the capacity to have emotions of various kinds comes by way of the acquisition of emotion concepts. This account relies on a constructionist theory of emotions and an embodied theory of emotion concepts. We explicate these elements…
Japan's National Security Council: Filling the Whole of Government
The creation of the National Security Council (NSC) in 2013 was part of the most ambitious reorganization of Japan's foreign and security policy apparatus since the end of the Pacific War in 1945. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe aimed to create a ‘Strategic Headquarters’ to better coordinate Japanese grand strategy across a fissiparous bureaucracy and political class. The formation of the NSC is a potential watershed in Japanese strategic policy-making…
Japan’s Nuclear Hedge: Beyond “Allergy” and Breakout
JAPANESE STRATEGISTS HAVE LONG BEEN AMBIVALENT about nuclear weapons. On the one hand, memories of horrific nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have sustained antinuclear sentiment and helped justify national policies championing nonproliferation and forgoing an indigenous nuclear arsenal. This “nuclear allergy” has been diagnosed as a genetic condition, and associated institutional and diplomatic constraints on nuclear breakout have been i…
New Fighting Power!” Japan's Growing Maritime Capabilities and East Asian Security
Japanese leaders struggled for decades to overcome legal, political, and normative constraints on the expansion of the Self-Defense Forces so that Japan could field a robust military. Their progress was steady and significant, but slow. Now, having reframed the nature of the threat Japan faces and having borrowed creatively from the U.S. model, they have found new traction by empowering the Japan Coast Guard (JCG). Today's JCG has what its public…
Securing Japan: The Current Discourse
A debate over grand strategy is underway in Japan, and its terms are familiar. Like their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors, Japanese security planners choose between economic and military instruments, between hard and soft power, among alliance partners, and for or against construction of multilateral security regimes. The revisionists who came to power in the early 2000s may supplant the Yoshida Doctrine with one of their own. Many…
Consuming for production: Japanese national security, nuclear fuel procurement, and the domestic economy
One of the most intriguing aspects of postwar Japan is a reversal of economic roles in which consumers serve producers rather than vice versa. By acquiescing to “consumer unfriendly” price and distribution systems, Japanese consumers have subsidized Japanese industry and Western consumers as well. Although much of the recent theorizing about Japanese production and consumption has focused on Japanese consumers as end users, it has seldom addresse…
The Industrial Destructuring of the Japanese Aluminum Industry
THE JAPANESE ALUMINUM INDUSTRY is in serious trouble. Its accelerating deterioration, and the resulting reordering of the industry throughout the Pacific basin, have been underway for nearly a decade. Curiously, this has received scant attention in Western media awash with accounts of the Japanese economic miracle. Unctuous eastward bows toward Japanese production methods, social organization, and industrial policy too often block the commonsensi…
Delusions and madmen: Against rationality constraints on belief
Hale’s argument from transitive counting
Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters
The Japanese people were promised much—too much, it turned out—in the immediate aftermath of the triple catastrophes that struck northeastern Japan in March 2011. Everything from public safety to national politics and social policy would be fixed, reborn, renewed, revitalized, transformed, reconstructed, and renovated. Daniel P. Aldrich, a specialist on postdisaster resiliency and controversial siting decisions, has produced a tidy evaluation of …
Japan’s Rhetoric of Crisis: Prospects for Change after 3.11
For some Japanese political entrepreneurs, the March 2011 catastrophe in Tohoku (3.11) was a warning for Japan to “put it in gear” and head in a new direction—away from nuclear power or toward a muscular military. For others, 3.11 was a once-in-a-millennium “black swan,” so Japan should “stay the course.” Still others say Japan must rebuild what was lost to modernity and globalization. The battle among these perspectives on change and the use of …
Kidnapping Politics in East Asia
In this article, I examine two contemporary cases in which the same foreign adversary, North Korea (DPRK), violated the sovereignty of neighboring states. I use a comparison of South Korean and Japanese reactions to political captivity to assess institutional performance in democratic states and ways in which these dynamics are connected to international politics. We see how “captivity narratives” can be differentially constructed and deployed an…
Local Politics in Japan: The Changing of the Guard
Research Article| July 01 1982 Local Politics in Japan: The Changing of the Guard Richard J. Samuels Richard J. Samuels Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1953) 22 (7): 630–637. https://doi.org/10.2307/2643700 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Searc…
The Industrial Destructuring of the Japanese Aluminum Industry
THE JAPANESE ALUMINUM INDUSTRY is in serious trouble. Its accelerating deterioration, and the resulting reordering of the industry throughout the Pacific basin, have been underway for nearly a decade. Curiously, this has received scant attention in Western media awash with accounts of the Japanese economic miracle. Unctuous eastward bows toward Japanese production methods, social organization, and industrial policy too often block the commonsensi…
Public energy corporations in the industrial democracies: Japan in comparative perspective
The Politics of Regional Policy in Japan
The Politics of Regional Policy in Japan: Localities Incorporated
This is the first major study of politics and public administration in Japan to balance the prevailing view of the regional policy process above with a view from below. Developing a comparative framework for understanding the place of localities in policy making, he demonstrates that relations among localities in Japan are much more important than previously supposedOriginally published in 1983.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-o…
The Local Politics of Kyoto
Consuming for production: Japanese national security, nuclear fuel procurement, and the domestic economy
One of the most intriguing aspects of postwar Japan is a reversal of economic roles in which consumers serve producers rather than vice versa. By acquiescing to “consumer unfriendly” price and distribution systems, Japanese consumers have subsidized Japanese industry and Western consumers as well. Although much of the recent theorizing about Japanese production and consumption has focused on Japanese consumers as end users, it has seldom addresse…
Japan in 1989: Changing Times
Research Article| January 01 1990 Japan in 1989: Changing Times Richard J. Samuels Richard J. Samuels Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1961) 30 (1): 42–51. https://doi.org/10.2307/2644771 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Rich…
The Formation of Science in Japan: Building a Research Tradition . James R. Bartholomew
The Past in Japan's Future: Will the Japanese Change
Rich Nation, Strong Army: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan
Tracking democracies: Italy and Japan in historical perspective
The Italian and Japanese roads toward democracy have been paved by external forces, by the timing of economic development, by ‘great’ leaders and by such factors as institutions, class structure, geography and even by accident. In finding a pair of countries where so much is similar, and yet where fundamental differences penist, comparativists have fertile ground in which to look for key factors in political (and democratic) change. This article,…
Mercantile Realism and Japanese Foreign Policy
Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-57)
Mercantile Realism and Japanese Foreign Policy
April 01 1998 Mercantile Realism and Japanese Foreign Policy Eric Heginbotham, Eric Heginbotham Eric Heginbotham is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Richard J. Samuels Richard J. Samuels Richard J. Sarnuels is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and Director of the MIT-Japan Program. Sear…
Evolutionary Psychology and the Massive Modularity Hypothesis
In recent years evolutionary psychologists have developed and defended the Massive Modularity Hypothesis, which maintains that our cognitive architecture—including the part that subserves ‘central processing’ —is largely or perhaps even entirely composed of innate, domain-specific computational mechanisms or ‘modules’. In this paper I argue for two claims. First, I show that the two main arguments that evolutionary psychologists have offered for …
Rich Nation, Strong Army: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan
Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition
List of contributors Preface 1. Introduction Peter Carruthers and Andrew Chamberlain 2. Massively modular minds: evolutionary psychology and cognitive architecture Richard Samuels 3. Individual differences in early understanding of mind: genes, non-shared environment and modularity Claire Hughes and Robert Plomin 4. Darwin in the madhouse: evolutionary psychology and the classification of mental disorders Dominic Murphy and Stephen Stich 5. Evolu…
Japan's Dual Hedge
LAST FALL, just eight days after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, announced that his country would provide military support to the United States for the war in Afghanistan. His statement seemed to signal a long-awaited shift in Japan's foreign and security policy. Stung by criticism that it had hesitated to lend a hand during the Persian Gulf War, this time Japan quickly declared s…
When leadership failed
Comparing Theories of Democratic Support: Lessons from Post-Communist Europe
This article sets out to evaluate the dominant approaches that are used to explain democratic support with a particular interest in what can be learned from the case of post-communist Europe. The main argument is that the case of post-communist Europe illustrates the weakness of the dominant sociological and instrumental approaches. In post-communist Europe democratic support does not depend on a familiarity with democratic institutions and norms…
Machiavelli's children: Leaders and their legacies in Italy and Japan
"In this book about leadership and historical choices, Richard J. Samuels emphasizes the role of human ingenuity in political change. He draws on interviews and archival research in a fascinating series of paired biographies of political and business leaders from Italy and Japan.". "Beginning with the founding of modern nation-states after the Meiji Restoration and the Risorgimento, Samuels traces the developmental dynamic in both countries throu…
Roundtable Discussion of Richard J. Samuels's Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan
Richard Samuels's book Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan raises a number of important issues concerning political leadership and the role individual leaders can play in a nation's history. The book won the 2003 Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies and the 2004 Jervis-Schroeder Prize for the best book in International History and Politics, awarded by the International History and Politic…
Japan's goldilocks strategy
Which Japanese leader will emerge to help build a consensus among the country's strategic choices: constructing a national identity as a great or middle power, defining its role in regional or global terms, and maintaining relations neither too close to nor too far from both Beijing and Washington
Secret Weapons and World War II: Japan in the Shadow of Big Science (review)
Reviewed by: Secret Weapons and World War II: Japan in the Shadow of Big Science Richard J. Samuels (bio) Secret Weapons and World War II: Japan in the Shadow of Big Science. By Walter E. Grunden . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. Pp. xi+335. $39.95. Walter Grunden has produced a superb study of how Japan mobilized science and technology to develop advanced weapons during World War II. In four well-crafted empirical chapters, he review…
Securing Japan: The Current Discourse
A debate over grand strategy is underway in Japan, and its terms are familiar. Like their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors, Japanese security planners choose between economic and military instruments, between hard and soft power, among alliance partners, and for or against construction of multilateral security regimes. The revisionists who came to power in the early 2000s may supplant the Yoshida Doctrine with one of their own. Many…
Political science (32 works) · Law (25 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Economics (18 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Japanese History and Culture (15 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works)