Published into the wake of the financial crisis of the late '80s, Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century was in large part responsible for a broad awareness of growing economic inequality on a global scale—now an accepted concept at play in our daily contemporary political discourse. Here, Piketty is once again our guide on a 500-year grand tour, deep dive into the historical "why" of these recurring economic disparities. Above all, Thomas Piketty traces the history of ideas—economic, cultural and political—but mostly those surrounding a society's notions of justice.
A New York Times Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year
The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system.
Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.
Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity.
Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new “participatory” socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.
Thomas Piketty is Professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Paris School of Economics and Codirector of the World Inequality Lab.
Table of Contents
Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction������������������� Part One. Inequality Regimes in History 1. Ternary Societies: Trifunctional Inequality 2. European Societies of Orders: Power and Property 3. The Invention of Ownership Societies 4. Ownership Societies: The Case of France 5. Ownership Societies: European Trajectories Part Two. Slave and Colonial Societies 6. Slave Societies: Extreme Inequality 7. Colonial Societies: Diversity and Domination 8. Ternary Societies and Colonialism: The Case of India 9. Ternary Societies and Colonialism: Eurasian Trajectories Part Three. The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century 10. The Crisis of Ownership Societies 11. Social-Democratic Societies: Incomplete Equality 12. Communist and Postcommunist Societies 13. Hypercapitalism: Between Modernity and Archaism��������������������������������������������������� Part Four. Rethinking the Dimensions of Political Conflict 14. Borders and Property: The Construction of Equality 15. Brahmin Left: New Euro-American Cleavages 16. Social Nativism: The Postcolonial Identitarian Trap�������������������������������������������������� 17. Elements for a Participatory Socialism for the Twenty-First Century Conclusion����������������� Glossary��������������� Contents in Detail������������������������� List of Tables and Illustrations Index������������
