Yoshiro Tamanoi, Economy and Ecology

Abstract

Yoshiro Tamanoi (1918-1985) was a scholar who traced a unique track in his research, which transcends the range of the discipline, not only in the historical study of economic thought, but also of economics in general. Tamanoi started his career as a historian of economics close to Kozo Uno (1897-1977), whose influence was so strong in post-war academia that a distinctive school of Marxian economics emerged under his name. Tamanoi was one of Uno’s first disciples to reconstruct Marxian economics as a basic theory of capitalism that can maintain itself on the basis of the transaction of commodities. When Tamanoi studied and began his academic career at the then Imperial Tohoku University in Sendai, Uno was a professor there. Both scholars moved from Sendai to newly founded departments of The University of Tokyo: Uno to its Institute of Social Science in 1947 and Tamanoi to its College of Liberal Arts in 1951. Tamanoi deviated from the Uno school or Marxian economics in the 1960s by advocating a dialogue between Marxian economics and the socalled modern economics, and further by promoting comparative studies of economic systems. He published Marxian Economics and Modern Economics in 1966 and introduced the basic Western literature of comparative economic system studies. In this period, his favourite scholars were economists who had broad integrative scopes of social sciences, such as J. A. Schumpeter and K. E.