ABSTRACT
The Polanyi school of economic anthropology demonstrated in the 1980s that “modernity,” an idea that Japanese people had long thought as self-evident, was in fact a relative concept in the epistemological sense. This also led, inevitably, to the reconsideration of the theories of social evolution. The validity of any historical theory based on stages of development, whether unilinear or multilinear, is now in serious doubt. The Marxist theory of multiple-stage development centered on a single country has lost its appeal. Similarly, in mainstream economics, the historical theory of economic growth is no longer able to explain the diverse reality.
