Kōjin Karatani. The Structure of World History

“Finally, to avoid any misunderstandings,” Kōjin Karatani states in the introduction to this book, “let me make one last observation. I am not trying to write here the sort of world history that is ordinarily taken up by historians. What I am aiming at is a transcendental critique of the relations between the various basic modes of exchange” (28). The substantive chapters that follow are not, by the “ordinary” standards of historical scholarship, very impressive, and in reviewing them for an historical journal, such shortcomings need to be noted. Karatani is better known as a theorist than as an historian, although this is not the place to present an authoritative evaluation of his efforts to combine Marxism, exchange theory, Freudian psychology, and theories of the state. What can perhaps be best determined here is whether his “transcendental critique” offers any useful insights into the history of either global political economy or the critical thought that has informed our understanding of its unfolding.

Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science) · Transcendental number · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies