What makes Thomas Piketty so sure he can save the world?

The French economist, statistician and polymath Thomas Piketty sprang to fame in 2013 with a daunting tome, Capital in the Twenty- First Century. In it he documented a ‘fundamental force of divergence’ in the capitalist system, which he represented by the equation r>g — the tendency for returns to capital to grow faster than national income, and therefore for wealth to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. This tendency was reversed between 1914 and 1980 by the impact of two world wars, the Great Depression, social democracy and the trade unions, but it has since reasserted itself, restoring levels of inequality last seen 100 years ago.

In his new blockbuster, Capital and Ideology, Piketty studies the transformation of ‘inequality regimes’ from premodern ‘trifunctional’ and slave societies to today’s hyperglobalisation, concentrating on the ‘capitalist’ or ‘proprietarian’ period from 1800. The book culminates in a programme for social democratic renewal to overcome the distempers of hyperglobalisation. The whole trajectory of human history is compressed into this framework — if compression is the right word to describe this sprawling production of more than 1,000 pages Piketty has amassed a huge amount of learning in support of a single thesis: that ‘inequality societies’ have been the historical norm but they are not inevitable. Rather, they depend on ideologies of justification, and much of the book is devoted to examining these ideologies, showing how they have always been contested and how they might be transcended, It is impossible not to admire the skill and perseverance with which he deploys his massive arsenal of data and arguments. Still, what caused this reviewer to rub his eyes was Piketty’s audacious self-assurance. Despite much cosmetic homage to the daunting complexity of his subject matter, he really does believe that he has solved the riddle of history. The magic key is not Marx’s class struggle but ideological conflict over property systems.