抄録
Discourses of neo-liberalism play nowadays an important role for propaganda of an ideology convergence of the whole world to the American economic model through the globalization. In order to criticize such a neo-liberalist point of view, the article points out, 1) the diversity of contemporary capitalism, 2) the driving principles of socio-economy and history: capital principle and society principle, and 3) the main aspects of social crisis in Japan. Succeeding to a pioneering classification, Anglo-Saxon and Rhine capitalisms, by M. Albert (1991), P. Hall and D. Soskice (2001) have made special reference to the way for firms to arrange their coordination problems and proposed a dichotomy of capitalism: liberal market economies (LMEs) and coordinated market economies (CMEs). In the LMEs like the USA, firms manage the activities via competitive market economies, while in the CMEs like Germany, they depend on non-market relationship: reliance and collaboration between firms. According to this approach, both types of capitalism show their own macro-economic efficiencies; it means non-convergence of capitalist economies to the LME. Though their dichotomy of capitalism is very simple and clear, yet it is too rough as a typology of capitalism. Setting a new concept of social systems of innovation and production (SSIPs) and introducing a cluster analysis of OECD's statistics, B. Amable (2003) has classified twenty-one countries into five models: Market-based, Asian, Continental European, Social-democratic and Mediterranean (or South European) capitalisms. He has thus far refined the analysis of capitalist diversity and criticized the neo-liberal hypothesis of convergence. Starting from his criterion of diversity of capitalism, we can put an idea of opposition and complementarity of 'capital principle' and 'society principle' as driving forces of socio-economy and history. Two principles have been influential alternatively in the modern history. From this point of view, the present age after Fordism is characterized by a predominance of capital principle over society principle or, in other words, by a reckless driving of capital principle, in opposition to the regulationist standpoint: capitalism must be socially domesticated. This is why we are today in a social crisis. With regard to the social crisis of Japan, it is fundamentally a crisis of companyist regulation or of company-led capitalism which was so efficient in the past years. Facing with globalization, neo-liberal pressures, aging society and knowledge-based society, the companyist regulation has turned out to be inefficient. In this situation, the neo-liberal responses by market fundamentalism have doubled the social crisis on the one hand, but the alternative way out from companyism is so far very weak and ambiguous on the other.
