Takahashi Korekiyo

The political mission of Friedrich List (1789–1846) was to build an independent, industrialized national economy in Germany, and he is considered one of the architects of German economic unity. His intellectual mission was to create an alternative, “national system” to counter the universalist “cosmopolitical” economics of the Smithian school. Takahashi Korekiyo (1854–1936) was a statesman rather than a theorist, and is most famous for guiding Japan’s early recovery from the Great Depression after 1932. Takahashi’s mission was likewise to build an independent, industrialized national economy, and he was a principal framer of what would later be called the “Japanese model” of development. List, despite his six years in America and his US citizenship, was until recently almost forgotten in the English-speaking world. Takahashi, who also learned his English in America, remains largely unknown outside his home country. Together, these two economic nationalists offer an “ex-centric” picture of modern economic globalization that reverses currently dominant definitions of universal norm and local exceptionalism.

There is a characteristic moral economy of deflation, and it can be traced with clarity in the case of Japan’s long deflation of the 1920s. Deflation emerged as an issue in 1919 and went to an extreme in 1929–31, under the liberal cabinet of Hamaguchi Osachi. To support its deflation policy, the cabinet launched an extraordinary campaign to induce households to reduce their consumption. Consumption was a specifically gendered conception, and women’s place as subjects and as objects of consumption became the symbolic center of a historic confrontation between orthodox “monetarist” and novel “Keynesian” ideas.