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Abstract The origin and development of modern East Asian Humanomics have been deeply shaped by Confucian thought, especially in countries like China and Japan. Japanese economist Kawakami Hajime (1879-1946) is a representative figure of this school. He forged a human-centred economic theory that integrates Confucian culture with Western economics while offering a penetrating critique of the “wealth-centric” orientation of mainstream economics. Kawakami argues that economics should emphasize moral cultivation and spiritual life, and that it ought not to revolve solely around the growth of material wealth, but instead address the conditions for the all-round development of human beings and their pursuit of happiness and fulfilment.
Kawakami’s Humanomics grew out of his study of Confucian thought in Tokugawa Japan. He sharply perceived the fundamental difference between the Confucian ideal of keisei saimin (“ordering the world and relieving the people”) and Western economics: Confucianism links economic questions to statecraft and insists that economic development be combined with the cultivation of personal virtue and spiritual civilisation, treating the economy as an instrument for achieving the latter. He further observed that, as Japan embraced Western economic theory, this dimension of thought was gradually marginalised. By translating Western “economics” simply as keizai, Japanese scholars obscured the differences in scope and problem consciousness between the two traditions. While acknowledging the limited analytical tools of Tokugawa Confucian scholars, Kawakami praised their doctrine for its profound insight into wealth and social development, stressing that Confucian economic thought values not only national wealth but also civic character and moral education-an orientation fundamentally at odds with modern economics, which tends to treat material wealth as the sole yardstick of social progress.
Chinese scholars encountered similar cultural frictions when modern economics was introduced—often via Japan—mirroring Japan’s own struggle to digest Western theory. Kawakami’s analysis of the tension between Confucian thought and modern economics helps to explain Chinese hesitations toward concepts such as “economy” and “competition.” His Humanomics is built upon this cultural conflict: on the one hand, he recognises the contribution of Western economics to productivity and growth; on the other hand, he affirms the centrality of Confucian culture for human spiritual civilisation. Accordingly, he does not advocate an extreme suppression of material desires, but calls for a balanced development of economic, social and spiritual life. To this end, he insists that economics take as its subject concrete individuals endowed with emotions and moral values rather than abstract egoists, and must treat altruistic motivation as a core dimension of economic behaviour-a position that shows clear affinities with Marshall.
Kawakami’s humanistic orientation laid an important intellectual foundation for his later turn to Marxism. In his view, only a thorough transformation of the existing economic order can bring about genuine equality, justice and all-round human development. This shift, however, was not a simple ideological conversion, but a deepening and development of his long-standing project in Humanomics. He believed that the spread of money-mediated egoism in capitalist society was eroding the moral basis of human life, and that the Confucian moral-economy tradition and Marx’s critique of capital were in many respects complementary. Thus, in embracing Marxism, Kawakami retained a strong Confucian-humanistic concern within his reading of Marx. His work not only advanced the development of economics in Japan, but also offered important theoretical resources for later Chinese scholars seeking to combine Confucian culture with modern economics and to develop a distinctively East Asian Humanomics.
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Published: 01 July 2026
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