Civil Society and Social Science in Yoshihiko Uchida

This book introduces the work of Yoshihiko Uchida (19131989), one of the most prominent Japanese thinkers on the topic of civil society in the post-World War II era. The distinctive features of Uchidas approach to civil society are his view of the metabolic relationship between human beings and nature and his call for a social science rooted in the experiences and inquiries of ordinary citizens. This original approach did not develop in a straight line from Uchidas early work to his mature period, and this book follows the twists and turns in its formation through his reflections on the relationships between the civil and the capitalistic, the modern and the pre-modern, the historical and the trans-historical, and science by specialists and inquiry by laypeople. As a historian of economic thought, Uchida pursued these topical themes by examining figures such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Hajime Kawakami, a prominent thinker in Japan. By casting a light on these inquiries, this book offers the first depiction of Uchidas body of work as a whole and in doing so illuminates the emergence of original democratic thought in post-war Japan.