This article investigates the idea around infection in social science, focusing on a treatise on blood transfusion by Richard Titmuss, “Gift Relationship” in 1970. According to Titumuss, blood had been an important theme for human beings and thus for anthropology, but it could be treated in a more scientific way. Around 1960s, efficient blood supply was of urgent necessity, owing to its serious shortage in hospitals. Blood banks with and without profit had been established, and some economic theorists extended their research into the area of health and welfare. But more fundamentally, it had already been indicated that the idea of welfare to exterminate by sanitization the infection as a sign of poverty, parallel to market mechanism, had limit and contradiction.

  Titmuss emphasized the superiority of given blood without profit to that with profit. He collected data of blood donors in the UK, USA, and some other countries, and analyzed that blood was supplied in many cases by those who belonged to lower income class and that the blood supplied without profit was much less infected than that supplied with profit. Though his conclusion was refuted by Kenneth Arrow who scrutinized it, Titmuss’ elaboration on infection through blood transfusion gave considerable influence both on theory and on practice.

  This article is based on a manuscript read at the 2021 Symposium of the Society for the History of Social Thought, with additions and revisions made in the spring of 2022, where many countries move increasingly toward “the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.” The pandemic since 2020 has given us experiences in which a sense of discomfort repeatedly arises with questions involving “the difficulty of understanding,” that H. Arendt once mentioned. The Covid-19 pandemic took the world by surprise, but the way we perceived the surprise was not completely novel: the perception that could have turned the death toll of the pandemic into a necessary recurrence and just said “sorry, some will die,” as has Brazil’s President J. Bolsonaro.

  In this article we trace some typical examples of the recurrence of panic, confusion, or fear, vis-à-vis the spread of the Covid-19 among societies, where the tumult often went too far and caused harm and sufferings in its turn. Those sufferings, apparently quasi-traditional to the human experience called ‘pandemic,’ must be taken very a novel and unexpected one unique to our own time. With numerous scientific developments given to us since the last century regarding the infectious disease, the “surprise” and suffering we saw this time with Covid-19 must be a testimony to the practical impossibility of the new knowledge and understanding, that we believe we have acquired.

  The Covid-19 pandemic was not only a medical disaster but also a political disaster. In Japan, for example, national leaders made policy decisions seemingly without thought or coordination, and people paid the price for this political disaster. Moreover, as Adam Tooze and others have pointed out, the neoliberal conditions already in place made it difficult for national and local governments to respond flexibly to Covid-19. Considering this background, this paper discusses how people have been disrupted in daily life, and in hospitals and how, in spite of this, they restored order and relationships through constant adjustments. In the analysis, I will make reference to and compare the history of the Spanish flu, which caused at least four million deaths worldwide 100 years ago. In the case of the Spanish flu, the First World War caused ordinary people, such as soldiers and medical personnel, to be affected by irresponsible political decisions, with makeshifts through unofficial coordination.

  This paper clarifies the relationship between democracy and education in John Dewey’s work by examining the transformation of his concept of democracy.

  First, this paper focuses on the discussions in Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916) and reveals his characterization of their relationship as “education for sustainable democracy.” I will show that Dewey takes the democratization of society as self-evident, and positions schooling as a means to maintain and sustain it. I will also show that Dewey tried to overcome the social divisions of the time by proposing an integration between civic and vocational education.

  Secondly, I will focus on the transformation of Dewey’s theory of democracy in the 1930s and show that it was transformed into an “education against the crisis of democracy.” In other words, I argue that Dewey’s democracy turned into a “socialist democracy” to fight the Great Depression, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, it became more and more a “militant democracy” fighting against totalitarianism. This paper clarifies the transformation of Dewey’s concept of democracy and education and discusses its possibilities and limitations.

  Shiraki Tachibana was a journalist on Chinese issues, known as the ideologue for Manchukuo. This paper analyzes the development of his theory on democracy from the 1920s to the Manchurian Incident and illuminates the relevance of Japanese social thought in the 1920s and 1930s.

  Tachibana was conscious of the failure of the classical liberalism and representative politics. He absorbed the discourse of “the right to life” that was popular in interwar Japan, and developed his version of democracy based on it. During the National Revolution Period in China, he highly appreciated Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People, considering it as a gradual “middle course” to realize socialism in China. Moreover, inspired by Sun’s theory of the Kingly Way, Tachibana developed his own version of it, which was in resemblance to the fundamental theory of the “welfare state”, claiming that the legitimacy of governance lies on the guarantee of the people’s “right to life”. Later he used the very same argument that the legitimacy of the governance lies on the guarantee of welfare, to denounce Chiang Kai-shek’s seize of power, and to legitimize the foundation of Manchukuo.

  The Kyoto School has carried a negative legacy because it was said to have promoted the Pacific War. The purpose of this paper is to review the political philosophy of the Kyoto School by focusing on Tönnies’ concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.

  Before the War, Hajime Tanabe argued that ‘the third society’ which sublate Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft would be the nation-state as ‘absolute negative synthese’, where conflicting theories, such as individualism and totalism as well as capitalism and socialism, were to be unified in a state of dynamic equilibrium. He believed that such an equilibrium state would restrain the capitalism.

  For Iwao Koyama, ‘the third society’ was Genossenschaft, an organization that was supposed to unify the opposing sides of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and to harmonize the conflicting elements in a society as peacefully as possible. Gesellschaft has to be transformed into Genossenschaft which would enable the realization of a new system that would overcome the capitalism.

  Although Tanabe and Koyama use different terms, nation-state and Genossenschaft, they shared the purpose of correcting harmful effects of capitalist Gesellschaft and trying to overcome the crisis.

  This paper examines the role of laughter and parody in Adorno’s thought. Parody has the characteristic of imitating a subject so closely that it becomes more “likely” than the subject itself, naturally, with certain changes. This exaggerated performance exposes the violence and logical flaws inherent in the original subject. Adorno actively adopts this “mimetic” behavior, which can be compared to the strategy unique to assimilated Jews who were forced to behave more German than actual Germans. Specifically, criticisms of ideologies such as indigeneity or “Eigentlichkeit” (authenticity) can be found through the self-mocking laughter of those who perform authenticity. Herein lies the significance of such performance of Odysseus depicted in Dialectic of Enlightenment, or of Adorno himself.

  Parody, on the other hand, leads to the illusion that one knows more about the “real” subject than the subject itself, as is the case with anti-Semites who hate Jews but are obsessed with caricatures of them. Adorno not only revealed this dangerous ambiguity of parody, but also practiced it himself, perhaps intentionally to a certain extent. Therein lies the limits of Adorno’s acting, and of acting itself. Moreover, this also provides context for his aversion to the “fake” culture of jazz.

  This article investigates the theories about authority of Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) and Gaston Fessard (1897-1978) who both dealt with political philosophy in France before and after joining the Resistance.

  After defining authority according to Kojève and Fessard in the first section, I clarify the essence of authority, based on their theories, in the second section. Next, I discuss what the common good generally means in the third section, and also elucidate the meaning of the common good as considered by Fessard, in the fourth section. Then in the fifth section, I examine whether there was any idea equivalent to the common good in Kojève’s writings. Finally in the sixth section, after developing an argument on the relationship between the common good and authority, I refer to the concept of the “Universal Common Good”.

  Kojève and Fessard share the idea of world citizens despite the decisive difference between them, namely that one is an atheist and the other a Christian. In this way, the characteristics of the arguments proposed by Kojève and Fessard can be seen in the fact that they defined the existential mode of the Universal State and the “Universal Common Good”, supported by authority.

  The purpose of this paper is to elucidate and defend Žižek’s turn from the ethics of desire sustaining the empty place of democratic power to the subject of drive. The latter enables a transition to communism from the vantage point of what Žižek calls the proletarian position, which is the position of such people as the inhabitants of slums who are structurally excluded from global capitalism. The second section of this paper identifies the theoretical weaknesses of early Žižek’s democratic subject of desire which heavily draws upon the radical democratic theory of hegemony provided by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The third section provides an in-depth account of the logic of drive in Tarrying with the Negative (1999) in order to counter the claim made by his critics that the subject of the Lacanian drive in Žižek is a Romantic Subject devoid of social and economic specificity. The fourth section delineates the contour of Žižek’s communism by analyzing his discussion into three main points: communism of commons, the proletarian position and the will of intervention including the use of state power in a “non-statal mode.” In the final section, I will explicate Žižek’s mature theory since Less than Nothing (2012) with particular attention to the ways in which the focus on the concept of drive has led Žižek to articulate the philosophical differences with Hegel.

  In recent years, there has been concern about the dysfunction of representative democracy. Many democrats have argued that the dysfunction of representative democracy should be addressed by strengthening participation, such as increasing turnout and participation in demonstrations. However, the participation approach is not appropriate, as it disregards the costs involved. This paper argues that instead of the participation approach, we should adopt the representation approach. The representative approach introduces two types of lottocratic chambers, one with a proposal function and the other with a decision function, in addition to the existing elected chamber. The representative approach is not only an effective response to the dysfunction of representative democracy. It is also less expensive than the participatory approach. The representative approach is therefore superior to the participatory approach in terms of cost-effectiveness. The representative approach is promising for improving the political decision-making system and is worth considering.