Think of it this way: even though past-era societies may seem vulgarly unfair to our modern eyes, for their time and age, they were consistent and sound enough to be stable and functional for long periods of time. But even a superficial analysis of how we got to where we are today reveals that societies are mostly governed and reformed through ideas innovations come after.

In other words, ideas and ideologies count in history.”Īt first thought, it may seem strange to claim that ideas matter as much as, say, technological innovations – after all, the Industrial Revolution was kickstarted by a steam engine. A little less than two centuries later, Piketty is tempted to reformulate the declaration as follows: “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of the struggle of ideologies and the quest for justice. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” wrote famously Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848. So, get ready to learn why inequality is not a natural economic phenomenon, and prepare to discover how political elites have tried to naturalize it throughout history so they could benefit from it. The book offers “an economic, social, intellectual, and political history of inequality regimes, that is, a history of the systems by which inequality is justified and structured.” “In large part a sequel to ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century,’” Piketty’s equally monumental “Capital and Ideology” weighs in at about 1,100 pages and picks up where its predecessor left off.

In 2013, the French economist Thomas Piketty released “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” a 700-page doorstopper that made him an academic “rock star.” Immensely researched and widely praised, the book piled graph upon graph to demonstrate that capitalism inexorably increases inequality and that – unless the trend is checked by a welfarist government – social instability may be the inevitable outcome of this seemingly innocuous tendency.

Capital and ideology paperback