 Tanabe got a head start on the postwar critics and toward the end of the war began thinking his way through a radical crisis of self-critique. Hardly less controversial than the roundtable discussions of the younger members of the Kyoto School have been Tanabe’s application—or misapplication—of his “logic of the specific” to a discourse on the legitimacy of the self-assertion of the Japanese nation-state as an archetype for others. The “logic of the specific” had originally been conceived, in critique of Bergson and Nishida, as a reappraisal of the logical and ethical role that ethnic specificity plays in mediating the particular individual and universal humanity. Adapting Hegel’s political philosophy, Tanabe thought that the nation-state could both embody the ethnic specificity of the people and raise it out of its inherent irrationality. As a concrete universal, the nation-state was, if not the absolute itself, in some sense the dialectical manifestation of the absolute on earth.