Hiroshi Uchida - Böcker

This groundbreaking collection surveys current research on Marx and Marxism from a variety of perspectives. Setting forward an unconventional range of questions for discussion, the book develops key ideas, such as the theory of history, controversies about justice and the latest textual scholarship on The German Ideology. Written by Japanese scholars, the volume affords western readers a glimpse for the first time, of the results of many years’ debates and discussion. Following the long tradition of Japanese interest in Marx, the book draws on the relationship between that and radical changes in local political context, as well as the economic and political development represented by Japan. Over the course of the chapters, Marx is rescued from ‘orientalism’, evaluated as a socialist thinker, revisited as a theorist of capitalist development and heralded as a necessary corrective to modern economics. Of particular interest are the major scholarly revisions to the ‘standard’ historical accounts of Marx’s work on the Communist Manifesto, his relationship to the contemporary theories of Louis Blanc and P.J. Proudhon, and new information about how he and Engels worked together.This landmark work opens up a world of Japanese critical engagement and lively scholarship that will appeal to anyone interested in Marx and Marxism.

This groundbreaking collection surveys current research on Marx and Marxism from a variety of perspectives. Setting forward an unconventional range of questions for discussion, the book develops key ideas, such as the theory of history, controversies about justice and the latest textual scholarship on The German Ideology. Written by Japanese scholars, the volume affords western readers a glimpse for the first time, of the results of many years’ debates and discussion. Following the long tradition of Japanese interest in Marx, the book draws on the relationship between that and radical changes in local political context, as well as the economic and political development represented by Japan. Over the course of the chapters, Marx is rescued from ‘orientalism’, evaluated as a socialist thinker, revisited as a theorist of capitalist development and heralded as a necessary corrective to modern economics. Of particular interest are the major scholarly revisions to the ‘standard’ historical accounts of Marx’s work on the Communist Manifesto, his relationship to the contemporary theories of Louis Blanc and P.J. Proudhon, and new information about how he and Engels worked together.This landmark work opens up a world of Japanese critical engagement and lively scholarship that will appeal to anyone interested in Marx and Marxism.

Marx’s Grundrisse is acknowledged as the vital link between Marx’s early and late work. It is also a crucial text in elucidating Marx’s debt to the idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. This book, first published in 1988, is the first full-length study of that relationship, in a thorough textual analysis which makes the connections explicit and also the Grundrisse’s relations to the works of Adam Smith and Aristotle. This book argues that Marx’s critique of political economy, and his critique of Hegel, are double interrelated. Not only did Marx adapt Hegelian logic in order to analyse the economic categories crucial to modern society but it is argued that those logical categories were themselves seen as reflections of the productive processes of contemporary commercial society. Uchida reveals a conceptual structure common to the apparently rarefied world of Hegelian conceptual logic and to the supposedly common-sensical world of economic science. Demonstrating this is a considerable achievement, and it allows us to consider precisely what is valuable today in Marx’s critical commentary on this conceptual structure and on the type of society in which it is manifested. Uchida’s subject, like Marx’s, is ‘the force of capital on modern life’.