A01=Tetsuo Najita
asian history
Author_Tetsuo Najita
capitalism
Category=KCZ
Category=NHF
commerce
commoners
cooperative action
credit
early modern japan
economic history
economic thought
economics
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethics
famine
finances
fiscal emergency
government
japanese capitalism
japanese history
loans
modernity
ordinary citizens
poverty
social well being
tokugawa japan
trade
traditional cooperative
Product details
- ISBN 9780520260382
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 16 Sep 2009
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Tetsuo Najita explores a powerful theme in the economic thought and practice of ordinary citizens in late Tokugawa and early modern Japan. He examines commoners' writings on the virtues of commerce, the reconstruction of villages, and groups offering credit and loans, particularly the traditional cooperative, the ko, which citizens created to save one another in times of famine and fiscal emergency without turning to their government. The alternative genealogy of early Japanese capitalism that emerges is based on cooperative action, whose motive for profit was combined with a concern for social well-being. Najita's discussion centers on the relationship of economics, ethics, and the epistemological premise that nature must serve as the first principle of all knowledge, and he illuminates comparative issues of poverty, capitalism, and modernity.
Tetsuo Najita is the Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor emeritus in the Departments of History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His many publications include Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise, Japan: Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics, and Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan.
