This emphasis might explain Piketty’s recurring references to nineteenth-century literary realism, like the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac. For example, in the crises and wars from 1914 to 1945, the increasing socialist protests against inequalities within nation-states and the resistance against global oppression in the colonies played a decisive role for the emergence of postwar social democracy (chap. 10).īy highlighting unrequited opportunities and ideological distortions, Piketty stresses the fundamentally unstable character of social reality. Deficits in discursive legitimacy and the perception of increasing social contradictions constitute the central conditions for crisis-like transitions between these regimes. First, the proprietary regime (a term with which Piketty replaces the less precise term “economic liberalism”), second, the social-democratic age, and third, contemporary hypercapitalism. This mode of analysis is also different from most approaches in mainstream economics, in which explanations for developments of inequality are often naturalized and, thereby, depoliticized.Īccording to Piketty, inequality regimes––the conceptual framework of his analysis––provide different answers to two fundamental questions of political communities: How is property organized? And how are borders––be they national, social, or bureaucratic––defined? In the twentieth century, Piketty diagnoses three major inequality regimes. Again and again, the author insists that at different points in time, several political pathways would have been possible. Piketty’s history of inequalities, in contrast, takes a different position: there is always an alternative. In Marxist approaches, the “history of class struggles” is usually connected to a deterministic view of history.

In his new book “Capital and Ideology,” Thomas Piketty provides a history of inequalities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020.

Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty