Science and Inquiry in Hajime Kawakami

Yoshihiko Uchida was a renowned scholar of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, but he was also a social scientist who struggled throughout his life with Hajime Kawakami (1879–1946), a unique thinker born in modern Japan. Kawakami is usually understood as a man who turned from humanitarian socialism to militant Marxism (Sect. 4.1). However, Uchida denies this conventional view and argues that Kawakami, while starting from a mixed ideology of nationalism and bourgeois rationalism (Sect. 4.2), understood that the absolutist view of the state unique to Japan had to change with the development of the division of labor and productive forces (Sect. 4.3). At the same time, Uchida found in Kawakami an idea that emphasized “the material metabolism between humans and nature” and “the conscious individual,” and also confirmed the importance of the issues of “selfishness and altruism” as well as of “economy and ethics.” Despite these matters of concern, Kawakami eventually approached Marxism, but his Marxism became a very specific one and was severely criticized by the dominant official Marxist view of the time (Sect. 4.4). As Kawakami tried to relearn the “true” Marxism, he underwent a drastic transformation. At the dawn of this transformation, Kawakami came to the conclusion that he would no longer be a creator of “academic inquiry” by thinking for himself but would be a commentator and propagator of Capital as a “science” and “truth” established by Marx and existing objectively at the time. The creative spirit in Kawakami disappeared and he was transformed into a preacher of the official conclusions of “science.” Uchida describes this as “tragic,” and it was indeed a tragedy for the Japanese social science community (Sect. 4.5). Kawakami himself was eventually forced to spend time in prison amidst the rise of militarism in Japan, and in his later years, after his release from prison, he withdrew from social life and spent his time appreciating and creating poetry. In the process, Kawakami’s creative spirit blossomed again in the form of literature (Sect. 4.6). Despite all the twists and turns, Kawakami lived fundamentally not as a scientist armed with precise and advanced scientific tools who sought results in the domain of his specialty, but as an ordinary person who grappled and tried to solve problems by starting from the questions that ordinary people feel. Uchida concludes that he wants to learn from Kawakami. From Kawakami’s anguished sway, we must learn a delicate relationship between “science” and “inquiry.”