century."
-DAVID GRAEBER, author of The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement
"Kojin Karatani's monumental and provocative synthesis testifies to a dramatic rebirth of universal history in recent times; but it does so by reuniting traditions-economics, politics, the social imaginary-which have proved increasingly sterile developed separately. His proposal involves a Borromean knot in which the three distinct areas of Capital, the Nation, and the State are both distinguished from each other and structurally recombined in their historical moments. His rereading of the Marxian modes of production (Marx's theory of universal his-tory) in terms of modes of exchange is heretical and revisionist, but also profoundly critical of both the anarchism and the social democracy it would seem to express. His discussion of nation and world empire replaces any number of globalization debates within a transformative or revolutionary framework. His luminous study of Marx's own work and politics then casts a whole new light on Hegel and Kant; and indeed the history of philosophy is as much at stake here as the histories of nationalism or anticapitalist movements. Finally, Karatani's own practical and theoretical experience of the cooperative moment opens up political perspectives which will be politically suggestive and energizing at a moment when left politics seems universally out of breath."
—FREDRIC JAMESON, author of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism