Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the interaction of Japanese neoliberal activists with Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. It argues that Japan was an active reformer of the global neoliberal movement by attempting to reconcile cultural nationalism with economic globalism.

Paper long abstract:

The shift to the right in the world’s political and economic landscape in the 1980s was premised on a deep tension. If neoliberal policies called for global integration through free trade and mechanisms of world governance, neoconservative arguments championed traditional cultural and economic values centered on the nation. This paper focuses on the two doyens of Japanese neoliberalism—the banker and policy advisor Kiuchi Nobutane and the academic Nishiyama Chiaki—to examine how they attempted to resolve this conflict by drawing on Japan’s model of development.

At the heart of the problem was how to reconcile the neoliberal universalism of Hayek and Friedman with the specificities of national context. Western thinkers within the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), the association founded by Hayek, argued that their models, grounded in objective knowledge of the market, constituted the best guide for the expansion of global capitalism. But Japanese members of MPS, buoyed by Japan’s economic growth from the 1960s to the 1980s, countered that national culture was a crucial element for the development of the world economy. The significance of Kiuchi and Nishiyama’s intervention is that they attempted a culturalist revision of neoliberal theories. Thus this paper shows the understudied Japanese contribution to the global neoliberal debates, arguing that despite neoliberal thinkers’ claim about the inherently open nature of the world economy, there is no theoretical obstacle between economic nationalism and globalism.