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.
