Piketty’s confrontation with the void leads him to something like a liberal argument for socialism, and as the rescue packages for a world struck down by Covid-19 pile up, he has, at least for the moment, a captive audience. Instead, he gives us a systematic examination of inequality across time and place, and of the ideas the powerful have used to justify it. He is not in the business of uncovering the ideological dynamics that make the interests of the powerful appear to coincide with everyone’s general interest-what Boutmy called ‘political hegemony’-or in explaining the way they have historically operated. But Piketty’s vital contribution is somewhat obscured by the book’s title.
In addition, the two authors demonstrate the limits, contradictions and errors of the so-called ‘Piketty revolution’.The book is packed with fascinating detail and vast quantities of skilfully assembled data it is written (and translated, by Arthur Goldhammer) in an accessible, conversational tone. What is correct in it? What are the criticisms of it? And what should we make of it-both of the book itself and of the criticism it has received? This book lays out the argument of Piketty’s monumental work in a compact and understandable format, while also investigating the controversies that this book has caused. Given the sensational reception of the not-so-easily digested 800-page study that spans back to the eighteenth century, the question as to where the hype around Piketty’s book comes from deserves to be asked. Thus, a small elite becomes simultaneously richer and richer and more and more powerful. The ‘rock star economist’s’ ( Financial Times) underlying thesis: inequality under capitalism has reached dramatic proportions in the last few decades and continues to grow-and not by coincidence. Piketty has been described as a new Karl Marx and placed in the same league as the economist John Maynard Keynes.
It has sparked major international debates, dominated bestseller lists and generated a level of enthusiasm-as well as intense criticism-in a way no other recent economic or sociological work has. US Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman described Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century as “perhaps the most important book of the last decade”.
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