Karatani, Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy

In Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy, Kōjin Karatani offers a powerful corrective to Athenocentric narratives of philosophy’s birth by relocating its emergence within the distinct social structures of the Ionian polis. His central claim—that philosophy arose in tandem with the political condition of isonomia (equality without rule)—grounds intellectual history in material social forms, particularly the dissolution of tribal affiliation and the rise of voluntary association in colonial settlements. By shifting from a Marxist focus on modes of production to modes of exchange, Karatani develops a flexible yet rigorously systematic account of how transformations in political and economic organization generate shifts in cultural consciousness. Early Ionian thinkers, from Thales to Democritus, are thus recast not as proto-scientists narrowly concerned with nature, but as social philosophers grappling with the collapse of egalitarian civic life under encroaching imperial and oligarchic forces. This reframing allows Karatani to interpret natural philosophy as a political and ethical project aimed at preserving a cosmopolitan ideal of freedom and reciprocity. While occasionally overreliant on speculative reconstructions and broad analogies, his intervention is invaluable for any project investigating how social structures condition the emergence of cultural forms. It reorients philosophical origins from abstract reason to the lived contradictions of early Mediterranean polities and offers a compelling model for integrating political economy into the genealogy of ideas.

Karatani’s book share with George Thomson’s The First Philosophers (1955) a broadly materialist orientation and a commitment to situating the origins of Greek philosophy within historical social transformations, but they differ significantly in method, emphasis, and theoretical sophistication.

Thomson, writing in the Marxist tradition of the mid-20th century, argues that early Greek philosophy emerged from the contradictions of a transitioning society—from a collectivist, tribal economy to class-based private property systems. His focus is on the ideological function of myth, religion, and philosophy as superstructural responses to economic shifts, especially in pre-class and early class societies. He emphasizes oral tradition, the social roles of poetry and ritual, and the gradual abstraction of thought as labor became increasingly divided. Philosophers like Heraclitus or Anaximander are, for Thomson, intellectuals responding to the disintegration of communal life and the rise of private property and the state. His analysis is historical and cultural, but tends to treat philosophy as an ideological reflection of class struggle, with less emphasis on the specific institutional or civic forms that mediate that struggle.

Karatani, by contrast, proposes a more nuanced and less deterministically economic account. Drawing from his own reinterpretation of Marx via modes of exchange (rather than production), Karatani locates the birth of philosophy in the specific social structure of isonomia—a historically rare condition of equality and no-rule that arose in Ionian colonial poleis. Where Thomson tends to emphasize structural economic contradictions, Karatani foregrounds the role of voluntary association, individual mobility, and civic formation in colonial settlements. His analysis incorporates philosophical, political, and cosmopolitan dimensions, arguing that Ionian thinkers were not only responding to class tensions but also engaging in ethical and metaphysical reflection rooted in their lived experience of an egalitarian polis threatened by tyranny and empire.