Kozo Uno (宇野 弘蔵) was a Japanese economist and is considered one of the most important theorists on the field of Marx's theory of value. He is an influential Marxist economist in Japan, where his school of thought is called the Uno School (Uno gakuha). His main work Principles of Economics [経済原論] was published in 1950-52. Among his scholars are Thomas T. Sekine and Makoto Itoh.

Thought

Uno based his work on a rigorously Hegelian reading of Marx's Capital. This led him to his well-known conclusion that Marxian analysis had to be conducted at three separate levels: Uno and his followers have come in for criticism from the wider Marxist tradition for insisting on this separation. Simon Clarke sees this schema as "scholastic formalism", and the second level as an arbitrary addition to provide a link between the other two, rather than an analytically necessary one. As Kincaid points out, though, Capital is primarily a logically rather than chronologically argued work, which looks at the laws of capitalist development and draws mainly supporting evidence from historical data. Thus, the separation of the Uno school represents an acknowledgement of this logical nature, and registers the key problem of how the critique can be linked to actual economic development in a way that competing schools often cannot.

Chronology

1897 1915 1918 1921 1922 1922-24 1924 1925 1930 1938 1939 1940 1941 1944 1946 1947 1949 1952 1953 1954 1958 1968 1969 1972 1977

Publications

As author

As co-author

As editor

As co-editor

As translator

Uno's works in English translation

Books

Essays