Kōzō Uno (Japanese: 宇野 弘蔵, Uno Kōzō; 12 November 1897 – 22 February 1977) was a Japanese Marxian economist. His work, which sought to create a purely "scientific" reading of Karl Marx's critique of political economy, was highly influential in postwar Japan and led to the formation of the "Uno School" of Marxian thought. Uno is best known for his three-level methodology for the study of capitalism, which he developed to separate what he saw as Marx's pure economic theory from its historical and empirical illustrations. This method consists of: (1) the "theory of principles" (genriron), which outlines the logic of a "purely capitalist society" abstractly; (2) the "stages theory" (dankairon), which analyzes the historical development of capitalism through mercantilism, liberalism, and imperialism; (3) the "analysis of the present situation" (genjō bunseki), which examines the concrete details of contemporary capitalism. In his major work, Principles of Political Economy, Uno reconstructed Marx's Capital to fit this three-level approach, arguing that Marx had improperly mixed these levels of analysis. Uno's reconstruction prioritized the sphere of circulation over production and was critical of Marx's introduction of the labor theory of value. His work and that of his followers, such as Thomas T. Sekine and Makoto Itoh, has been influential in Anglophone Marxian debates, but has also has been criticized for by some for 'removing the critical core of Marx's work, particularly the theory of commodity fetishism', in favor of an equilibrium-based model of capitalism.
Source: “Kozo Uno”, English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), excerpt