Kohei Saito

Kohei Saito
斎藤 幸平
Born	(1987-01-31)January 31, 1987
Alma mater	University of Tokyo (withdrawal) Wesleyan University (BA) Free University of Berlin (MA) Humboldt University of Berlin (PhD)
Notable work	Karl Marx's Ecosocialism (2017), Capital in the Anthropocene (2020)
Era	Contemporary
Region	Japanese philosophy
School	Continental, Marxism
Institutions	Osaka City University University of Tokyo
Thesis	Natur gegen Kapital (Nature versus Capital)
Main interests	Economy Ecology

Kohei Saito (斎藤 幸平, Saitō Kōhei) (born January 31, 1987) is a Japanese philosopher. He is an associate professor at the University of Tokyo. Saito works on ecology and political economy from a Marxist perspective.

Early life and education

After graduation from Shiba Junior & Senior High School (芝中学校・芝高等学校), a private school in Tokyo, Saito studied at first at the University of Tokyo (UT) for three months and voluntarily withdrew from the UT, to enroll Wesleyan University, Connecticut from 2005 to 2009, and began his master's studies at the Free University of Berlin in 2009, and then completed his doctorate at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

In 2016, Saito published the book Nature versus Capital. Marx's Ecology in his Unfinished Critique of Capitalism, which is based on his doctoral dissertation. In it, he performs the reconstruction of Karl Marx's ecological critique of capitalism, in which he draws on extensive manuscripts and excerpts from Marx's estate.

Saito co-edited Volume 18 of Division Four of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, which was published in 2019. Work on this book also informed his dissertation, which he completed at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Andreas Arndt is his doctoral advisor. In 2017, the English-language version of his book was published, and in 2020 he was awarded the JSPS Prize for it by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Furthermore, in 2018 he won the Deutscher Memorial Prize for Marxist Research named after Isaac Deutscher.

Saito was subsequently a visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and from 2017 to March 2022 he was an associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan University. He was made an associate professor at the University of Tokyo in April 2022.

His 2020 published volume Capital in the Anthropocene became an unexpected bestseller in Japan, selling over 250,000 copies by May 2021, sales figures rose to more than 500,000 by mid-2022.

Publications (selected)

• Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy, Monthly Review Press, 2017.

See also

• Anthropocene