Institutions and Material Conditions: The Problem of History in Piketty’s Capital and Ideology

Abstract

In his celebrated 2013 volume, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty set out a detailed empirical account of the accelerated growth in inequality within and between societies around the globe, noting that over the past two centuries increases in wealth have increasingly made their way into the pockets of fewer and fewer people. His latest book returns to the question of inequality, but the focus is on what he sees as its ideological origins rather than its empirical manifestatio...