ABSTRACT
Tokuzo Fukuda (1874-1930), a great pioneer of modern economic thinking in Japan, published his last work, Welfare Economic Studies in 1930, just two months before his death at the age of 56. In the introduction, he commented on the state of the economics profession in Japan: ‘It is said that economics has reached a deadlock. Often we hear voices proclaiming the ruin of the German Historical School or the bankruptcy of the marginal utility theory. But among my fellow scholars, not a few have cast their eyes towards the quickly taken escape routes of Marxism or, especially, historical materialism’. Further, other people called for and rushed to accept new principles, such as the institutional school and behaviorism popular in America, Douglasism or new liberalism in Great Britain, or, from continental Europe, Schumpeterianism, the functional theory of Gustav Cassell and others, as well as Othmar Spann’s universalism or Max Weber’s idealism. Fukuda could pay no heed to any of these, nor hold out great expectations for the mathematical research of Léon Walras, Francis Edgeworth, Vilfredo Pareto, and Irving Fisher, whose work had not, he believed, progressed far. Therefore, he stated: ‘The only course left to me is to move forward on the thorny trail of welfare economics forged by our teachers Hobson, Pigou, and Cannan’ (Fukuda 1930:3-6).
