Kozo Uno’s Elaboration of Marxism in the Light of Marx and Hegel

Abstract

Uno learned from Marx the method of “critiquing” classical political economy, and that, by faithfully following that method, Uno discovered in effect the “rational kernel of the dialectic within the mystical shell” of Hegel’s idealist philosophy. Having thus established the materialist “dialectic of capital” as the theory of economics, a factual science, at the core of Marxism, he in effect “inverted” its conventional view. In doing so, Uno also discovered the sense in which the knowledge of human society can be judged to be “objective”, though in a sense quite different from that in which the knowledge of a natural science is commonly believed to be so. Furthermore, Uno’s implicit Hegelianism has enabled him to defy the modern philosophical tradition of the “dichotomy between the physical and the spiritual”, and Kant’s thesis pertaining to the impossibility of penetrating the thing-in-itself of an object of study in the sphere of the non-spiritual, i.e., the factual. For, there exists a “social (inter-human) space” yet to be explored between the spiritual and the physical. Uno also discovered that social science must begin with investigations into “capitalist society”, a particular case, before arriving at a more general idea of what any “human society” may be like, rather than the other way round. We need to pay due attention to this feature of Uno’s thought which requires us to go from the best developed particular (capitalism) to arrive at the general (human society in general), rather than the other way round, in quest of true social-scientific knowledge.