Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy

In Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy—published originally in Japanese and now available in four languages—Kojin Karatani questions the idealization of ancient Athens as the source of philosophy and democracy by placing the origins instead in Ionia, a set of Greek colonies located in present-day Turkey. Contrasting Athenian democracy with Ionian isonomia—a system based on non-rule and a lack of social divisions whereby equality is realized through the freedom to immigrate—Karatani shows how early Greek thinkers from Heraclitus to Pythagoras were inseparably linked to the isonomia of their Ionian origins, not democracy. He finds in isonomia a model for how an egalitarian society not driven by class antagonism might be put into practice, and resituates Socrates's work and that of his intellectual heirs as the last philosophical attempts to practice isonomia's utopic potentials. Karatani subtly interrogates the democratic commitments of Western philosophy from within and argues that the key to transcending their contradictions lies not in Athenian democracy, with its echoes of imperialism, slavery, and exclusion, but in the openness of isonomia.
"In our anti-Eurocentrist era, attempts abound to 'decenter' European legacy, to demonstrate how European ideology borrowed from and simultaneously oppressed other traditions. Kojin Karatani does something very different: he decenters European legacy from within, shifting the accent from the classic Greek idealism (Plato, Aristotle) to its half-forgotten predecessors, the so-called Ionian materialists (Thales, Democritus), the first philosophers who were also the true founders of democratic egalitarianism. Karatani’s book makes you see the entire history of philosophy in a new way; it deserves to become an instant classic."
(Slavoj Žižek)
"A unique and ambitious intellectual project, Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy marks a new phase in the history of Marxism and in the career of Kojin Karatani. It should be regarded as one of the radical critiques of Western metaphysics by virtue of its challenge to conventional accounts of the origins of philosophy. This work is of historical importance."
(Naoki Sakai, author of Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism)