In Archaism and Actuality eminent Marxist historian Harry Harootunian explores the formation of capitalism and fascism in Japan as a prime example of the uneven development of capitalism. He applies his theorization of subsumption to examine how capitalism integrates and redirects preexisting social, cultural, and economic practices to guide the present. This subsumption leads to a global condition in which states and societies all exist within different stages and manifestations of capitalism. Drawing on Japanese philosophers Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun, Marxist theory, and Gramsci’s notion of passive revolution, Harootunian shows how the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and its program dedicated to transforming the country into a modern society exemplified a unique path to capitalism. Japan’s capitalist expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rise as an imperial power, and subsequent transition to fascism signal a wholly distinct trajectory into modernity that forecloses any notion of a pure or universal development of capitalism. With Archaism and Actuality, Harootunian offers both a retheorization of capitalist development and a reinterpretation of epochal moments in modern Japanese history.

Harry Harootunian explores the formation of capitalism and fascism in Japan as a prime example of the uneven development of capitalism.

A major Marxist thinker and critic in 1930s Japan, Tosaka Jun was among the world’s most incisive—yet underrecognized—theorists of capitalism, fascism, and ideology during the years before World War II. The Japanese Ideology is his masterpiece, first published in 1935, as Japan and the world plummeted into an age of reaction. Tosaka offers a ruthless philosophical critique of contemporary ideology that exposes liberalism’s deep complicity with fascism. The Japanese Ideology provides a materialist analysis of the reactionary ideology then overtaking Japan, with profound significance for anywhere fascism has taken root. Modeled after Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, it critiques idealism as the common ground for liberalism and fascism, against which only historical materialism can suffice. Tosaka demonstrates how liberal and fascist ideas at once justified and concealed Japan’s colonization of East Asia, and he investigates the many traces of fascism in Japanese thought and society. The Japanese Ideology makes an important intervention in Marxist theory by criticizing reliance on the East/West binary and the notion of the “Asiatic mode of production.” Robert Stolz’s translation introduces Anglophone readers to a classic of twentieth-century Marxist thought by an unsung peer of Gramsci and Benjamin with striking relevance today.

Using material remains, as well as the evidence of contemporary Greek history, rhetoric, and poetry, David Castriota interprets the Athenian monuments as vehicles of an official ideology intended to celebrate and justify the present in terms of the past. Castriota focuses on the strategy of ethical antithesis that asserted Greek moral superiority over the "barbaric" Persians, whose invasion had been repelled a generation earlier. He examines how, in major public programs of painting and sculpture, the leading artists of the period recast the Persians in the guise of wild and impious mythic antagonists to associate them with the ethical flaws or weaknesses commonly ascribed to women, animals, and foreigners. The Athenians, in contrast, were compared to mythic protagonists representing the excellence and triumph of Hellenic culture. Castriota's study is innovative in emphasizing the ethical implication of mythic precedents, which required substantial alterations to render them more effective as archetypes for the defense of Greek culture against a foreign, morally inferior enemy. The book looks in new ways at how the patrons and planners sought to manipulate viewer response through the selective presentation or repackaging of mythic traditions.

Acclaimed historian Harry Harootunian calls attention to the boundaries, real and theoretical, that compartmentalize the world around us. In one of the first works to explore on equal footing 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—Harootunian seeks to expose the problematic nature of scholarly categories. In doing so, History's Disquiet presents intellectual genealogies of such orthodox notions as "field" and "modernity" and other concepts intellectuals in the East and West have used to understand the changing world around them. Contrasting reflections on everyday life in Japan and Europe, Harootunian shows how responses to capitalist society were expressed in similar ways: social critics in both regions alleged a broad sense of alienation, particularly among the middle class. However, he also points out that Japanese critics viewed modernity as a condition in which Japan—without the lengthy period of capitalist modernization that characterized Europe and America—was either "catching up" with those regions or "copying" them. As elegantly written as it is controversial, this book is both an invitation for rethinking intellectual boundaries and an invigorating affirmation that such boundaries can indeed be broken down.