A genuine Copernican turn in Kantian and Marxist theory and practice.

In _Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy_—published originally in Japanese and now available in four languages—Kojin Karatani questions the idealization of ancient Athens as the source of philosophy and democracy by placing the origins instead in Ionia, a set of Greek colonies located in present-day Turkey. Contrasting Athenian democracy with Ionian isonomia—a system based on non-rule and a lack of social divisions whereby equality is realized through the freedom to immigrate—Karatani shows how early Greek thinkers from Heraclitus to Pythagoras were (...) inseparably linked to the isonomia of their Ionian origins, not democracy. He finds in isonomia a model for how an egalitarian society not driven by class antagonism might be put into practice, and resituates Socrates's work and that of his intellectual heirs as the last philosophical attempts to practice isonomia's utopic potentials. Karatani subtly interrogates the democratic commitments of Western philosophy from within and argues that the key to transcending their contradictions lies not in Athenian democracy, with its echoes of imperialism, slavery, and exclusion, but in the openness of isonomia. (shrink)

アテネのデモクラシーは、自由ゆえに平等であった古代イオニアのイソノミア(無支配)の成功しなかった再建の企てであった。滅びゆくイソノミアを記憶し保持するものとしてイオニアの自然哲学を読み直し、アテネ中心 主義的に形成されたデモクラシーの神話を解体する。『世界史の構造』を経て初めてなった政治的想像力のみずみずしい刷新。.