Masao Maruyama was one of the most influential contemporary Japanese intellectuals. Tadashi Karube is his heir in the sense that he is a professor in the School of Legal and Political Studies at the University of Tokyo, the institution from which Maruyama retired in 1971.
Maruyama both embodied and formed the development of political thought in 20th-century Japan. With the book under review Karube presents his intellectual biography.
Born in 1914, the year of the outbreak of World War I, and dying in 1996, Maruyama's life spanned almost exactly what historian Eric Hobsbawm has called "the short 20th century," which, according to him, was characterized by the disastrous failure of state communism, capitalism and nationalism. Maruyama was Japan's most attentive and critical commentator of these developments.