Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty

(September 2019, Harvard University Press, 1150pp)

Following upon the global success of his previous book, Capital in the 21st Century, in this new book Piketty demolishes the belief that extreme inequality is unavoidable. It is a choice we have made, and can be rolled back if we so wish. “The market and competition, profits and wages, capital and debt, skilled and unskilled workers, natives and aliens, tax havens and competitiveness—none of these things exist as such,” Piketty insists, drawing heavily on the Hungarian-British economic historian Karl Polányi. “All are social and historical constructs” that “depend entirely” on the “systems that people choose to adopt and the conceptual definitions they choose to work with.”

Piketty takes us through time, from feudalism through the early period of capitalism and the social democratic welfare state to the neoliberal era that we find ourselves in. He demonstrates how massive inequalities have been recreated, how the poor have been abandoned by the Left, and how this has lead to domination by the identitarian nativist Right. He also advances some proposals about how to fix the social formation that we live in.