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...

Nation and Aesthetics is a unique attempt to examine the ambiguous nature of nationalism and nation by examining them through aesthetics. In this translation by Jonathan E. Abel, Darwin H. Tsen, and Hiroki Yoshikuni, Karatani grasps the modern social formation as a nexus of three different "modes of exchange," namely capital-nation-state. Nation here plays the role of complementing capitalism and the state. Benedict Anderson defined nation as an "imagined community." Through rethinking Kant, Karatani suggests that "imagination" here is not a mere fancy, but very real, in the sense...