In the intellectual ferment which defeat and occupation brought to Japan the social sciences underwent a particular upheaval. The decade before the war had seen their development stultified by the officially enforced atmosphere of dogmatic moralism and irrational metaphysics which was actively inimical to any positivistic and scientific study of life in society. The end of the war opened the flood-gates to the works of American and European writers of the previous two decades. It also gave courage and opportunity to the intellectuals who had received their academic training in the more liberal period of the twenties or in foreign universities but had since preserved silence or lost their way.