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Tricks of Transference: Oka Asajirō (1868–1944) on Laissez-faire Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2010

Gregory Sullivan
Gregory Sullivan*
Affiliation:
United States Merchant Marine Academy
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Argument

Contrary to common portrayals of social Darwinism as a transference of laissez-faire values, the widely read evolutionism of Japan's foremost Darwinist of the early twentieth-century, Oka Asajirō (1868–1944), reflects a statist outlook that regards capitalism as the beginning of the nation's degeneration. The evolutionary theory of orthogenesis that Oka employed in his 1910 essay, “The Future of Humankind,” links him to a pre-Darwinian idealist tradition that depicted the state as an organism that develops through life-cycle stages. For Oka, laissez-faire capitalism marked the moment when the state began to decline toward extinction due to the orthogenetic overdevelopment of hitherto subordinate individual egos. Because conservative bureaucrat-intellectuals had been drawing upon this same organicist-developmental tradition since the 1880s in an attempt to forestall the social ills of industrialism, Oka's call for statist measures, including eugenics, to lessen and delay the atomizing, enervating, and corrupting influence of capitalism articulated the political vision of officialdom. Statist evolutionism, not social Darwinism, might be the term that best describes Oka's approach.

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 367 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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