Suchergebnisse

Harry Harootunian questions the claims of "Western Marxism" and its presumption of the final completion of capitalism. If this shift in Marxism reflected the recognition that the expected revolutions were not forthcoming in the years before World War II, its Cold War afterlife helped to both unify the West in its struggle with the Soviet Union and bolster the belief that capitalism remained dominant in the contest over progress. This book deprovincializes Marx and the West's cultural turn by returning to the theorist's earlier explanations of capital's origins and development, which followed a trajectory beyond Euro-America to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Marx's expansive view shows how local circumstances, time, and culture intervened to reshape capital's system of production in these regions. His outline of a diversified global capitalism was much more robust than his sketch of the English experience in Capital and helps explain the disparate routes that evolved during the twentieth century. Engaging with the texts of Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and other pivotal theorists, Harootunian strips contemporary Marxism of its cultural preoccupation by reinstating the deep relevance of history

America's preeminent intellectual historian of modern Japan inaugurates a challenging debate on the arbitrary cultural divisions of our world, and in the process sheds light on the troubling academic enterprise called "area studies." This is one of the first works to explore on equal footing the European and Japanese conceptions of modernity -- as imagined in the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, as well as ethnologist Yanagita Kunio and Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun

In the reckoning of historian Enzo Traverso, the accumulative inventory of the past's crimes has exceeded the 'frontiers of historical research' and colonised the public sphere to 'interpellate our present'. The quarrel over the crisis of historicism before World War ii has been superseded by postwar debates that have now spilled over into everyday life that demand recognition as instances of the continuing collision of claims of a past that refuses to pass and the formation of a new historical consciousness in which collective memory of the crimes occupies a central position. Traverso's purpose has been to repair this emergent dichotomy between historical practice and memoration, event and experience, as well as to overcome attending binary couplings like subjective and objective, individual and group in order to avoid falling into an unbridgeable antinomy that risks collapsing into contradiction.

This response to Tomba'sMarx's Temporalitieshomes in on its critical interrogation of linear conceptions of development which have distorted Marxism's capacity to seize the present. The article foregrounds the resources on which Tomba draws, from Walter Benjamin's theses on history to Marx's account of the struggles over the working day, and enlists them in an encounter with the questions of unevenness, archaism and pre-capitalism in Postcolonial theory, as well as in the attempts to 'overcome modernity' that marked the thought and practice of interwar fascism in Europe and Japan.

"Archaism and Actuality considers the relation of capitalist formation and fascism while continuing Harry D. Harootunian's theorization of subsumption-the ways that capitalism integrates and redirects pre-existing social, cultural, and economic practices. Harootunian proposes that all societies in the orbit of capitalism were subjected to the regime of uneven and combined development, and highlights Japan as an example of this phenomenon. The book engages the theoretical work of Marx and Gramsci and situates its analysis around the history of Japan, specifically in terms of three moments: the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the 1930s world crises and rise of Japanese fascism, and Japan's postwar afterlife. Harootunian uses the titular archaism as a framework for thinking through these historical moments and their use of the past in replacing or guiding the present"--