Thomas Piketty’s new book surveys not only capitalist societies but colonial, slave-owning and feudal ones, too. In almost all, income and wealth have been distributed highly unequally
Belknap Press; 1,104 pages; $39.95 and £31.95.“Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, first published in 2013, made the French economist a household name. Combining heavy economic theory with data wizardry and commentary on the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac, Mr Piketty argued that capitalism almost inevitably generates high and rising inequality.
None of this analysis of elite skulduggery is very novel. For example, Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School argued that the media turned people into capitalist drones. Michel Foucault examined how prisons, hospitals and schools shaped good capitalist subjects. It is a familiar one. In 1867 Marx said the “essential difference between…a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted”. Capitalism, in other words, was just as exploitative and immoral as slavery or feudalism—it just did a better job of covering it up. As Mr Piketty casts his eye over a millennium of global history, he reaches a strikingly similar conclusion.
The last part of his book focuses on his alternative to “neo-proprietarianism”. He is no fan of Soviet communism, in part because he accepts that society “sometimes requires small businesses funded with private capital and employing a handful of workers”. And though he is encouraged by the willingness of politicians in the mid-20th century to confront elites, for instance by steeply raising income and inheritance taxes, he cannot bring himself to endorse 20th-century social democracy.
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