Why Thomas Piketty Thinks We Should Not Naturalize Inequality

“Piketty wants to re-orient the political left away from cultural and educational issues, which dominate the mindset of the elitist ‘Brahmin left’ in his telling, and back to the economic concerns that were once the Left’s bread and butter”

Introduction

Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital and Ideology accomplishes the impressive task of making his earlier tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century look like a mere appetizer, despite his previous book clocking in at over 800 pages. The new book tops 1,100 pages, a truly door-stopping length, and it has generated reviews ranging from praise to more critical takes. Capital and Ideology is nothing less than a panoramic history of inequality across the globe—analyzing everything from ancient slave societies to the calcified hierarchies of the early 21st century. My own review will be releasing shorty (spoiler: it is largely positive), but in this short piece, I wanted to highlight what I think is the most important takeaway from Piketty’s text.

Political Economy and Inequality

One of Piketty’s major ambitions is to resuscitate the long dormant field of political economy. He insists that his peers make the mistake of interpreting economics as a purely technical discipline, which should be studied in isolation from political, cultural, and historical concerns. This is a major mistake, since it both attaches undue scientific prestige to what it ultimately an all too human discipline—and because it risks approaching social phenomena in a highly abstract way. The most obvious is the economic study of inequality, which, for many years, was considered a peripheral or moral concern that had little relevance for economists interested in maximizing economic growth. By contrast, Piketty claims that inequality is—along with climate change—the central challenge we face today, as disparities in wealth approach levels not seen since the 19th century. The book opens with the striking claims that—contra some who claim we must simply learn to live with inequality—there is no economic necessity to just accept the status quo:

“Inequality is neither economic nor technological: it is ideological and political. This is no doubt the most striking conclusion to emerge from the historical approach I take in this book. In other words the market and competition, capital and debt, skilled and unskilled workers, natives and aliens, tax havens and competitiveness-none of these things exist as such. All are social and historical constructs, which depend entirely on the legal, fiscal, educational, and political systems that people choose to adopt and the conceptual definitions they choose to work with. These choices are shaped by society’s conception of social justice and economic fairness and by the relative political and ideological power of contending groups and discourses. Importantly, this relative power is not exclusively material; it is also intellectual and ideological. In other words, ideas and ideologies count in history. They enable us to imagine new worlds and different types of society. Many paths are possible.”