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Pub Date: September 2024
392 Pages
The Japanese Ideology
A Marxist Critique of Liberalism and Fascism
Tosaka Jun. Translated by Robert Stolz.
Columbia University Press
Awards
A major Marxist thinker and critic in 1930s Japan, Tosaka Jun was among the world’s most incisive—yet underrecognized—theorists of capitalism, fascism, and ideology during the years before World War II. The Japanese Ideology is his masterpiece, first published in 1935, as Japan and the world plummeted into an age of reaction. Tosaka offers a ruthless philosophical critique of contemporary ideology that exposes liberalism’s deep complicity with fascism.
The Japanese Ideology provides a materialist analysis of the reactionary ideology then overtaking Japan, with profound significance for anywhere fascism has taken root. Modeled after Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, it critiques idealism as the common ground for liberalism and fascism, against which only historical materialism can suffice. Tosaka demonstrates how liberal and fascist ideas at once justified and concealed Japan’s colonization of East Asia, and he investigates the many traces of fascism in Japanese thought and society. The Japanese Ideology makes an important intervention in Marxist theory by criticizing reliance on the East/West binary and the notion of the “Asiatic mode of production.” Robert Stolz’s translation introduces Anglophone readers to a classic of twentieth-century Marxist thought by an unsung peer of Gramsci and Benjamin with striking relevance today.
About the AuthorTosaka Jun (1900–45) was a Marxist philosopher of science and cultural critic. He was cofounder and editor of the journal Materialism Studies. Arrested several times in the 1930s, he died in prison on August 9, 1945.
Robert Stolz is associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is coeditor of Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader (2014) and author of Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870–1950 (2014).
A major Marxist thinker and critic in 1930s Japan, Tosaka Jun was among the world’s most incisive—yet underrecognized—theorists of capitalism, fascism, and ideology during the years before World War II. The Japanese Ideology is his masterpiece, first published in 1935, as Japan and the world plummeted into an age of reaction. Tosaka offers a ruthless philosophical critique of contemporary ideology that exposes liberalism’s deep complicity with fascism.
The Japanese Ideology provides a materialist analysis of the reactionary ideology then overtaking Japan, with profound significance for anywhere fascism has taken root. Modeled after Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, it critiques idealism as the common ground for liberalism and fascism, against which only historical materialism can suffice. Tosaka demonstrates how liberal and fascist ideas at once justified and concealed Japan’s colonization of East Asia, and he investigates the many traces of fascism in Japanese thought and society. The Japanese Ideology makes an important intervention in Marxist theory by criticizing reliance on the East/West binary and the notion of the “Asiatic mode of production.” Robert Stolz’s translation introduces Anglophone readers to a classic of twentieth-century Marxist thought by an unsung peer of Gramsci and Benjamin with striking relevance today.
About the AuthorTosaka Jun (1900–45) was a Marxist philosopher of science and cultural critic. He was cofounder and editor of the journal Materialism Studies. Arrested several times in the 1930s, he died in prison on August 9, 1945.
Robert Stolz is associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is coeditor of Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader (2014) and author of Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870–1950 (2014).
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Permanently silenced by Japan’s pre-war state, the philosopher Tosaka Jun’s The Japanese Ideology remains the most powerful critique of Japan’s descent into fascist oppression. A homage to Marx and Engels, it perceptively illuminated how Japan’s embrace of fascism evolved from its own modern history linked to the 1930s world conjuncture. Robert Stolz’s masterfully translucent translation of The Japanese Ideology constitutes an event in itself that speaks directly to our collectively shared present.
Harry Harootunian, University of Chicago
In a moment of danger, Robert Stolz has performed a true act of historical materialist service by recovering this lost classic of antifascist theory. With a conceptual rigor largely unmatched by his European contemporaries, Tosaka Jun provides a philosophical cartography of fascism that illuminates both its disavowed affinities with liberalism and its global scope as a politics of capitalist crisis whose archaic appearances are a product of imperialism's all-too-modern contradictions. Reckoning with The Japanese Ideology will be essential for all those persuaded that deprovincializing the debate on fascism is an urgent intellectual and political task.
Alberto Toscano, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
Robert Stolz’s exceptional translation and brilliant editorial framing of the legendary Tosaka Jun’s most famous text is an event for thought and criticism, for contemporary politics, and for the history of global critical theory. Insofar as fascism—and especially fascism’s complementary relationship to liberalism—remains a question for our time, Tosaka’s formulations retain a contemporary and trenchant critical force. His acerbic, razor-sharp insights provide a remarkable theoretical and political grasp of how the hypocrisy, spinelessness, and compliance of the dominant order paved the way for fascist solutions to the intractable problems of global modernity. Tosaka’s original text was among the most devastating and incisive critiques of the social drift of Japan into the fascist direction, aided by the ’neutrality’ of liberalism’s fantasies of the market and culturalist mystifications; Stolz’s translation resurrects and places in our hands a decisive weapon for all who would seek to understand the political dynamics of our moment. An extraordinary achievement.
Gavin Walker, Cornell University
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Introduction, by Richard Stolz
Acknowledgments
Preface (1935)
Preface to the Revised Edition (1936)
Supplemental Preface to the Revised Edition (1937)
Part I: Foundation for a Critique of Japanism
1. Problems in Contemporary Japanese Thought: Japanism, Liberalism, Materialism
2. Foundation for a Critique of Japanism: A Critique of Philological Philosophy
3. An Analysis of “Common Sense”: Toward a Resolution of Two Contradictions in Social Common Sense
4. On Enlightenment: The Meaning and Necessity of Enlightenment Today
5. A Scientific Critique of Culture: An Outline for a Critique of National Purification
6. Japanist Ideology: Japanese Spiritualism, Japanese Agrarian Fundamentalism, Japanese Pan-Asianism
7. Japanese Ethics and Anthropology: An Analysis of the Social Meaning of Watsuji Tetsurō’s Ethics
8. An Analysis of the Restorationist Phenomenon: On the Famialism Analogy
9. The Essence of Cultural Control: An Analysis of Various Aspects of Cultural Control in Contemporary Japan
10. The Fate of Japanism: From Fascism to the Ideology of the Imperial Way
Part II: Foundation for a Critique of Liberalism
11. Modern Idealism in Disguise: Foundation for a Critique of “Hermeneutic Philosophy”
12. “The Logic of Nothingness,” Is It a Logic?: On Nishida’s Philosophical Method
13. The Sorcery of “Totality”: Takahashi Satomi’s Philosophical Method
14. Literature and Philosophy in an Age of Reaction: On the Delusions of “Literaturism”
15. The Essence of “Literary Liberalism”: The Progressive and Reactionary Nature of “Liberals”
16. The Consciousness and Class Theory of the Intelligentsia: Against the So-Called “Class Theory of Intelligence”
17. Doubts on the Theory of the Intelligentsia: Is the Current Problematization of the Intelligentsia Mistaken?
18. The Theory of the Intelligentsia and the Theory of Technology: A Reexamination of the Theory of Technology
19. Liberal Philosophy and Materialism: Against Two Types of Liberal Philosophy
20. Contemporary Japanese Thought: The Superiority of Materialism for the Question of Thought
Part III: The Masses and Socialism in an “Age of Reaction”
21. The Current Meaning of “Progressive” and “Reactionary”
22. A Reconsideration of the Masses
23. Liberalism, Fascism, Socialism
Afterword: A Japanese Ideology for Our Time
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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