The Discrete Ideology of Thomas Piketty: Successes and Failures of ‘Capital and Ideology’

“Whereas Piketty’s earlier book was often accused of ignoring the role that political doctrines played in naturalizing inequality, he has here devoted an entire text to that very subject.”

Thomas Piketty is a French economist, who currently teaches at the Paris School of Economics. He is also the author of a book published in 2011 entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Expressed schematically, its thesis is that—should we consult a vast array of data sets—we will find that the rate of return on capital invariably exceeds the rate of economic growth. From this, Piketty—whose discontent with the post-Reagan economic status quo is palpable—draws broadly redistributive conclusions.

Indeed, in the introduction to Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty evinces frustration at the historical insensitivity and fetishization of mathematical models favored by the (Anglo-American) neoclassical economic consensus.

These points may seem rudimentary. However, they are, in fact, essential for understanding Piketty’s latest magnum opus, Capital and Ideology (which Matt McManus, something of a wunderkind himself, has recently summarized and responded to for Areo). First, by his own admission, Piketty’s Frenchness and his status as an economist do not always exist at ease. Indeed, in the introduction to Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty evinces frustration at the historical insensitivity and fetishization of mathematical models favored by the (Anglo-American) neoclassical economic consensus. He also positions himself as a successor to the grand lineage of social scientists who taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris—among them Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Pierre Bourdieu. And, second, Capital and Ideology must be understood as a supplement (and corrective to) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Whereas Piketty’s earlier book was often accused of ignoring the role that political doctrines played in naturalizing inequality, he has here devoted an entire text to that very subject. And whereas it was additionally accused of Eurocentrism on account of its disproportionate dependence on data from the United Kingdom, the United States and France, Piketty in Capital and Ideology seeks to contextualize inequality in a number of nations in the developing world, including China, India and Brazil.

Any evaluation of Capital and Ideology’s weaknesses should be couched in a significant disclaimer: that it is a remarkable book and one that easily justifies the Herculean task of wading through its thousand-plus pages. Particularly impressive is the scope of Piketty’s historical analysis. Whereas many economists are content to confine their observations to capitalism, Capital and Ideology offers an ambitious summary of the ideological scaffolding employed by various different societies. This is reflected in the book’s fourfold structure. Its first part deals with “ternary” societies (that is, societies defined by a tripartite class structure of rulers, priests, and workers). Its second addresses slave-owning and colonial societies, and its third concerns itself with the alternatively social-democratic, communist and hypercapitalist states of the twentieth century. Its fourth serves as a survey of present global economic and political conditions, which Piketty characterizes as defined by the conflict between an intellectually chauvinistic “Brahmin left”—attested by the way that social-democratic or centre-left parties such as the British Labour Party or French Parti socialiste have increasingly become the refuge of the highly educated—against an economically chauvinistic “merchant right.” This political dispensation, which pits privilege against privilege, has contributed to the naturalization of a neoliberal consensus in which significant equalizing measures are dismissed out-of-hand as being unaffordable, undesirable, or both. And this is a trend that has enabled the growth of more radical political factions on the Right and Left alike. With this in mind, Piketty—invoking the legacy of the welfare statism that dominated the West in the mid-twentieth century—proposes a number of reforms, which he believes would help make our current society both more equitable and more stable. These include allowing workers to participate in corporate structures through a system of co-management, imposing a substantial tax on personal wealth, cracking down on tax havens, investing more in less privileged students, and so forth.

Piketty’s efforts to address the blind spots of Capital in the Twenty-First Century both with respect to its lack of political focus and its first-world fixation are, often enough, successful. But they also predictably lead him away from the shallower philosophical waters of that tome, and, in turn, into murkier subject matter of which he has less mastery. Piketty is surely aware at this point that the same qualities that made him uncomfortable with the Anglo-American economic establishment during his stint teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the mid-1990’s are—like Eminem’s whiteness boomeranging in his favor—the same ones that have now helped him garner a large audience. Indeed, mathematical models that abstract selectively from reality so as to rationalize the dominant order may suffice in times of prosperity.