Civil Society and Social Science in Yoshihiko Uchida

This book introduces the work of Yoshihiko Uchida (1913-1989), one of the most prominent Japanese thinkers on the topic of civil society in the post-World War II era. The distinctive features of Uchida's 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 Uchida's early work to his mature period, and this book follows the twists and turns in its formation through his reflections on the relationships between "e;the civil"e; and "e;the capitalistic,"e; "e;the modern"e; and "e;the pre-modern,"e; "e;the historical"e; and "e;the trans-historical,"e; and "e;science by specialists"e; and "e;inquiry by laypeople."e; 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 Uchida's body of work as a whole and in doing so illuminates the emergence of original democratic thought in post-war Japan.