Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses a series of debates between the economist Friedrich Hayek and members of the New Kyoto School as a philosophical event relevant to understanding the conflictual reception of neoliberal ideas in Japan outside policy circles.

Paper long abstract:

In the early 1980s, advocates of neoliberal reform in Great Britain and the United States pointed to increased competition with Japan to justify their policy choices. The tables turned during Japan’s long recession in the 1990s. Economists now argued that Japan had to embrace neoliberalism – with the US and Britain as models – in order to regain its competitiveness. With this historical twist in mind, my paper examines a visit to Japan by one of the intellectual founders of the neoliberal movement one year before Thatcher’s ascent to the office of Prime Minister. In 1978, the economist Friedrich Hayek participated in four dialogues with the ecologist Imanishi Kinji and the literary critic Kuwabara Takeo in Kyoto on “Nature, Humanity, and Civilisation.” Understanding the relationship between this “philosophical event” (Gordon 2010) and the history of neoliberalism and Japan requires careful attention to the interaction between historical context and intellectual content. Partly filmed in a television studio and partly set in a temple surrounded by Buddhist monks, the dialogues were carefully staged as the newest chapter in a long series of productive intellectual encounters between Japanese and Western civilisation. The exchange turned out to be unexpectedly contentious however. Ranging from the meaning of Darwin’s theory of evolution to the revolutionary nature of the Meiji Restoration, the conversations repeatedly ended with the participants opposed or perplexed. Yet in placing Hayek at the centre of the conversation, this philosophical event also signals a deep engagement on the side of Japanese intellectuals with the ideas of the foremost theorist of neoliberalism. This paper examines the degree to which contemporary Japanese understandings of nature and civilization as expressed by Imanishi and Kuwabara were compatible with the theories of Hayek. In so doing, it sheds new light on the Japanese receptivity of neoliberalism while at the same time showing Hayek’s enthusiasm for non-Western intellectual traditions.