Authenticity and Fascism in the Age of Global Capital: A Transnational History

Dr. Chika Tonooka – Pembrooke College, The University of Cambridge

My paper will present a transnational intellectual history of Britain and Japan in order to explore the relationship between the global expansion of capitalism, cultural fascism and the search for authenticity. The talk is based on a chapter from my forthcoming book, Rival Civilisations: The Rise of Japan and Ideas of World Order in Britain (under contract with Princeton University Press). I will explore early-twentieth-century British intellectual interest in Japan as an alternative modernity – a modernity that had seemingly preserved a timeless authentic ‘soul’. Japan, British intellectuals thus hoped, might provide a model for the cultural-spiritual renewal of the modern capitalist West. My talk will focus on British liberal writings and consider their ideas alongside – and elucidate their commonalities with – the writings of influential Japanese philosophers who are sometimes considered to have supplied intellectual foundations for Japanese fascism. What, then, are we to make of this intellectual convergence between British liberals and Japanese ‘fascists’?