Paper short abstract:

In the history of economic thought, "East and West" examples in the spheres of exchange or accord of ideas can be of particular interest. Here Japan and Poland; in both Marxism was greatly studied and debated during the early 20th century, when dealing with similar national and socioeconomic issues.

Paper long abstract:

Everything we find in our economic textbooks are ideas and theories greatly debated and contested during the past decades and centuries (even millennia). Why, how and where were those ideas developed? By who? Questions like that can help us see the world around us differently. They can help us study more deeply the formation and development of economic thought until today. And by knowing what has been said in the past, under which circumstances, the debates concerning critical economic issues etc. we can better understand the present and better act for the future. In this framework, it is important to get to know what the people of the biggest economies today, such as Japan or China considered as economics and economic policies in the past, but also to study them alongside the ideas developed in our "spheres of intellect".

In an 1934 article , Oskar Lange mentioned Professor's Kei Shibata (1933) theoretical research , as the first attempt to bridge the gap between Marxian economics and the general equilibrium theory. This simple reference, after a closer examination, shows that the cases of Japan and Poland, during the early 20th century, present some common points, which are interesting to pay attention to. Both those countries were dealing with the urge to organize, modernize and stabilize their nations, after important sociopolical changes took place. Japan was experiencing a rapid industrialization and transformation, after the Edo-period "isolation", and Poland was trying to find its new position on the "map", as an independent state "à nouveau" (despite of course each following a clearly different path). Moreover, in both those countries Marx's work was decisive in the evolution of intellect, especially in the formation of their particular economic thinking (thinkers like Hajime Kawakami and Oskar Lange studied the work of Marx and interpreted it in their own way). A joint study therefore, of such paradigms can let us examine those "contacts", their importance for the evolution of economic thinking, as well as the influence factors such as historical facts, geopolitical conditions, religions, customs etc. have on the formation of economic thought as such.