Book review on Hiroyasu Uemura, Japanese Institutionalist Post-Keynesians Revisited: inheritance from Marx, Keynes and Institutionalism Springer, 2023

Abstract

Professor Hiroyasu Uemura’s new book revisits the intellectual heritages of Eiichi Sugimoto, Shigeto Tsuru, Shigenobu Kishimoto, Yoshihiro Takasuka, Mitsuharu Itoh, Yoshikazu Miyazaki, Hirofumi Uzawa, Tsuneo Ishikawa, under the name of the Japanese Institutional Post-Keynesians (JIPKs). They were commonly inspired by K. Marx and J. M. Keynes and had an institutional economic way of thinking. The book characterises them as "institutional economics in a broad sense" and comparatively highlights their creative rivalry. These contributions are also compared to contemporary institutional economics such as Robert Boyer and Samuel Bowles, and it is confirmed that the JIPKs’ works are pioneers in this field. This book review assesses Uemura’s work as a rediscovery of the intellectual heritages of the JIPKs, setting up new research agendas from an evolutionary and institutional perspective, and reconstruction of economics as a moral science. Finally, it also gives some critiques and questions, particularly asking if the JIPKs are institutional economists, and what to do to develop to achieve the author’s goal.