It has happened plenty of times before, he reminds us: Unfair economic systems that seemed immutable, whether in Edwardian Britain or early 20th-century Sweden, were swept away in a relative blink of an eye and replaced with something more fair. The rules of the political and economic game are set up by people of property and privilege in order to propagate more property and privilege.Īt its heart, Capital and Ideology seeks to understand why the less advantaged masses, who’ve seen their share of the economic pie drastically shrink in recent decades, don’t unite to press for sweeping political changes that could bring economic justice. “Inequality is neither economic nor technological it is ideological and political,” Piketty writes. Inequality isn’t the natural, inevitable outcome of capitalism and the market, in other words it’s an outcome chosen by the haves. Whether in pre- and post-revolutionary France, colonial Haiti, belle epoque Europe, or Ronald Reagan’s America, the rules of the political and economic game are set up by people of property and privilege in order to propagate more property and privilege. And those inequality regimes don’t come about by accident but by design. As for the why, Piketty argues that so-called inequality regimes-systems that embed a cycle of inequity-generally exist almost everywhere across the map and in the history books until, in some happy cases, they are swept aside. In Capital and Ideology, Piketty seeks to do a couple of things he didn’t in the previous book: better explain why and how inequality persists and why even more radical solutions are necessary to reverse the trend.

Arthur Goldhammer, Harvard University Press, 1,104 pp., $39.95, March 2020

95, March 2020Ĭapital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Harvard University Press, 1,104 pp. Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty, trans.

Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty