When one of the moderators asked him if he believed in the prospects of the Grand Soir—the Great Evening, or the notion of an inevitable workers’ revolution that has inspired generations of French leftists—Piketty fired back, “The Grand Soir is great, but it’s the morning after that interests me most.”
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INEQUALITYMAY 19, 2020
What Are the Roots of Global Inequality?
At over 1,100 pages, Thomas Piketty’s new book offers us not only a history of economic injustice but also a program aimed at making it disappear.
COLE STANGLER
"Piketty’s latest work offers us plenty of valuable ideas. But in the end, one can’t help but wonder if he underplays the extent to which individuals’ access to and relationship with wealth (their position in the property regime, one might say) influences how they look at the world and engage in politics. Ultimately, the interests that unite the top one-tenth of 1 percent of wealth holders may be a bit stronger than Piketty suggests, not unlike the ties that bind the bottom 60 percent or so. Piketty’s views on this mark a clear departure from the Marxist conception of class, yet his open-ended vision of historical change still offers space for popular agency.
After all, whatever label one prefers—the “working class,” “the multitude,” “the people,” or something else—it remains up to us to build the movements and organizations required to make a world better suited to human needs. And perhaps someday, the myths we tell ourselves about why things are the way they are will be considered every bit as cruel and irrational as those of the past and will cease to be specters that haunt our present."
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ECONOMIC POLICYMARCH 26, 2020
Thomas Piketty: Confronting Our Long History of Massive Inequality
We talked to the French economist about his new book Capital and Ideology, his thoughts on Covid-19, and more.
DANIEL STEINMETZ-JENKINS
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- With his #1 New York Times bestselling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century,
- invigorated global debate about inequality,
- disrupted the field of economics by contesting the ideas it has long held most precious, and
- swiftly established himself as one of the world’s leading intellectual voices.
Now, Capital and Ideology is the epic follow-up to that landmark text.
Piketty offers a crucial retelling of social, intellectual, and material history around the world, a new framework for understanding social progress, and a series of proposals for the fundamental reform of capitalism.
•May 28, 2020
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