Sho Konishi. Anarchist Modernity

Sho Konishi's brilliantly researched Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan seeks to uncover a history lost to a historiographic gaze incapable of seeing non-state, cross-border networks and movements. Instead of privileging states, institutions, and national boundaries, Konishi foregrounds a vast web of personal contacts that allowed Russian and Japanese revolutionary movements to intersect over a 50-year period spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those intersections forged, Konishi argues, a “cooperatist anarchist modernity” (p. 3), a non-state and cross-border movement that left an indelible imprint on modern Japanese culture. The term “cooperatist anarchism” identifies Konishi's principal historiographical contribution to how we understand the intellectual culture of modern Japan. “Cooperatism” refers to principles of mutual aid that stood outside of and even against the state, and more importantly preceded Western conceptions of civilizational progress. It was that alternative vision of social practice and organization that Russian and Japanese revolutionaries came to hold in common and in self-conscious opposition to the West's celebration of capitalism and the nation-state. Rooted in this anti-Western convergence, anarchism itself was more than nihilistic and reactionary; instead, Konishi insists that the anarchism that took root in Japan via Russian revolutionaries possessed its own distinct vision of a progressive future. In combining the two, then, Konishi identifies a political and social culture distinct from Western notions of progress, created and sustained through informal networks of Russian and Japanese intellectuals.

Art · Capitalism · Historiography · Literature · Modernity · Opposition (politics) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Reactionary · Russian culture · Sociology · State (computer science) · Chinese history and philosophy · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law