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Scoop.it!
Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History is an astonishing work of synthetic historical theory: world history is the history of modes of exchange. 
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Scoop.it!
Karatini focuses on world history as an evolution of ‘modes of exchange’, i.e. how humans produce, but most of all, ‘exchange’ value. Like Alan Page Fiske, in ‘Structures of Social Life’, Karatini recognizes four basic ways of doing this, and these modes exist at all times and in all places. For example, while the dominance of capitalism is new, markets have existed since very early times; or, if the dominance of the state was new after the replacement of tribal systems, distribution depending on rank pre-existed its dominance. This insight is very important because it allows us to recognize that any political and economic system is not just one modality, but an integration of modalities. As Dmytri Kleiner says, ‘we live in a multi-modal world’, and ‘if the capitalists won, its because there were capitalists already’
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Scoop.it!
Karatini focuses on world history as an evolution of ‘modes of exchange’, i.e. how humans produce, but most of all, ‘exchange’ value. Like Alan Page Fiske, in ‘Structures of Social Life’, Karatini recognizes four basic ways of doing this, and these modes exist at all times and in all places. For example, while the dominance of capitalism is new, markets have existed since very early times; or, if the dominance of the state was new after the replacement of tribal systems, distribution depending on rank pre-existed its dominance. This insight is very important because it allows us to recognize that any political and economic system is not just one modality, but an integration of modalities. As Dmytri Kleiner says, ‘we live in a multi-modal world’, and ‘if the capitalists won, its because there were capitalists already’.
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