No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Piketty and the Political Origins of Inequality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 June 2021
Abstract
We examine Thomas Piketty's explanations for steady and rising inequality in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the decline of inequality in the half-century after World War I, and the return of high levels of inequality since the 1970s. We specify empirical and conceptual problems with his analysis, which stem from his presentation of causality at a highly general and vague level. That leads him to confuse rather than clarify the causal relations among implacable economic forces, changes in technological innovation and population growth, ideology, and governmental policies and the outcomes that he seeks to explain. We identify social scientists and historians who are able to account for temporal and geographic variations in the political coalitions that propelled egalitarian reforms, and that in their absence cleared the terrain for reactionary anti-egalitarian policies that the rich incited for their narrow benefit. We explain why Piketty's limited conception of ideology is insufficient for explaining how mass opposition to inequality is mobilized. We show that if we want to combine the study of capital in the twenty-first century with that of politics, we need a broader conception of ideology than what Piketty offers, one that will allow us to specify how ideology affects parties, states, voters, and activists.
- Type
- Inequality in Piketty
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History
Footnotes
Acknowledgments: We gratefully acknowledge helpful advice from Margaret Somers and Monica Prasad.
References
Boushey, Heather, Bradford DeLong, J., and Steinbaum, Marshall, eds. 2017. After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Gerald F. 2009. Managed by the Markets: How Finance Reshaped America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Delsol, Jean-Philippe, Lecaussin, Nicolas, and Martin, Emmanuel, eds. 2017. Anti-Piketty: Capital for the Twenty-First Century. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute.Google Scholar
Dobbin, Frank and Zorn, Dirk. 2005. Corporate Malfeasance and the Myth of Shareholder Value. Political Power and Social Theory 17: 179–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eidlin, Barry. 2018. Labor and the Class Idea in the US and Canada. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Fligstein, Neil. 2005. The End of (Shareholder Value) Ideology. Political Power and Social Theory 17: 223–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Robert. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hall, Peter and Soskice, David, eds. 2001. Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickel, Jason. 2016. The True Extent of Global Poverty and Hunger: Questioning the Good News Narrative of the Millennium Development Goals. Third World Quarterly 37, 5: 749–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ho-fung, Hung. 2017. The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Elisabeth. 2017. Everywhere and Nowhere: Politics in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In Boushey, Heather, DeLong, J. Bradford, and Steinbaum, Marshall, eds., After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 512–40.Google Scholar
King, J. E. 2017. The Literature on Piketty. Review of Political Economy 29, 1: 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krier, Daniel and Amidon, Kevin. 2018. Beyond Piketty's Economism: History, Culture, and the Critique of Inequality. In Langman, Lauren and Smith, David A., eds., Twenty-First Century Inequality & Capitalism: Piketty, Marx and Beyond. Leiden: Brill, 171–85.Google Scholar
Krippner, Greta. 2011. Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lachmann, Richard. 2013. Toward a Sociology of Wealth: Definitions and Historical Comparisons. Sociologia, Revista da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto 26: 11–36.Google Scholar
Lepage, Henri. 2017. Piketty on Management and Wealth. In Delsol, Jean-Philippe, Lecaussin, Nicolas, and Martin, Emmanuel, eds., Anti-Piketty: Capital for the Twenty-First Century. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute.Google Scholar
Maddison, Angus. 2006. The World Economy, Volume 1: A Millennial Perspective, and Volume 2: Historical Statistics. Paris: OECD Development Centre.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mankiw, N. Gregory. 2015. Yes, r > g. So What? American Economic Review 105, 5, Papers and Proceedings, May: 43–47.+g.+So+What?+American+Economic+Review+105,+5,+Papers+and+Proceedings,+May:+43–47.>Google Scholar
Mann, Michael. 2012 and 2013. The Sources of Social Power. Vols. 3 and 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mudge, Stephanie. 2018. Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Nielsen, Eric. 2017. Human Capital and Wealth before and after Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In Boushey, Heather, DeLong, J. Bradford, and Steinbaum, Marshall, eds., After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 150–69.Google Scholar
Panitch, Leo and Gindin, Sam. 2012. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of the American Empire. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Phillips-Fein, Kim. 2009. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google ScholarPubMed
Pinker, Steven. 2018. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Potter, Michael. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century: A Critique of Thomas Piketty's Political Economy. Agenda: A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform 21, 1: 91–113.Google Scholar
Prasad, Monica. 2006. The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Prasad, Monica. 2012. The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheve, Kenneth and Stasavage, David. 2016. Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Somers, Margaret R. and Block, Fred. 2005. From Poverty to Perversity: Ideas, Markets, and Institutions over 200 Years of Welfare Debate. American Sociological Review 70, 2: 260–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Somers, Margaret R. and Block, Fred. 2020. Polanyi's Democratic Socialist Vision: Piketty through the Lens of Polanyi. In Desai, Radhika and Levitt, Kari Polanyi, eds., Karl Polanyi and Twenty-First-Century Capitalism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 211–30.Google Scholar
Tribe, Kenneth. 2015. Wealth and Inequality: Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Past and Present 227, 1: 249–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walby, Sylvia. 2018. Turning Piketty into a Sociologist? In Langman, Lauren and Smith, David A., eds., Twenty-First Century Inequality & Capitalism: Piketty, Marx and Beyond. Leiden: Brill, 56–63.Google Scholar