i picked up his new one and will report when im done
finished it about two weeks back. after reflection i think id go so far as to say the two books jointly constitute what is probably the timeliest social science of the moment, whatever it’s boundaries are, that we’re living in. i mean that in nietzsche’s sense. im not aware of another intellectual product of the past ~10 years that captures and answers the anxieties of its present with more lucidity. and if one of it’s intuitions proves right -that we’re standing at a liminal moment in political history- i think later generations will look back on the two books, and
Capital and Ideology in particular, as definitive pieces of scholarship, whatever their failings.
but what’s actually in it? for starters, all the old empirics from the first book, plus additional similar empirics from the postcolonial south and postcommunist east. the narrative skeleton’s largely the same, rising inequality in the 19th century, dips down in the mid 20th, shoots back up in the late 20th with no imminent signs of stopping by the end of the first fifth of the 21st. what’s different is the interpretive flesh that’s encasing it all: r > g is either scrapped or silent (i dont care to find out which is actually the case); piketty was pilloried for describing it as an inexorable law of capitalism in the first book when nothing in that book committed him to say it wasn’t simply a trend, and a rectifiable one, within certain private property regimes. and this is largely what he does in his new book. the development of inequality is explained here by i) trends and laws of political economy and ii) ideology, or, reflexive normative attitudes taken towards the distribution of goods/wealth that do work to either justify or challenge that distribution.
before your ears prick up at that causal division nota bene to the dear reader, he imagines the term ‘ideology’ value-neutrally and in some kind of robust autonomy from the economy. he means it less marxly and more de tracy...ly. ideology also splinters itself along multiple different axes: inequality, property, legal, identitarian; they’re alternately regnant or subordinate, coextensive/mutually supporting or contradictory at different periods in different places.
so much for the methodological groundwork. the main meat of the book’s in the grand historical narrative, again, somewhat carried over from
Capital in the 21st Century but greatly expanded. for one, he posits that pre-modern (roughly meaning pre-industrial) societies, of whatever stripe, can be fit into a general class he calls ‘ternary’ or ‘trifunctional’. the model is ancien regime france: warrior-nobility that provides arms and material security, clerisy that produces literate culture and usually religious legitimacy, and the laboring multitude who produce everything else. how the three orders concatenate and jockey over privilege and how that all relates to the different ideological ‘regimes’ and distribution of goods in all the different cases is a lot of the fun of the book. but it doesnt last, because certain states start getting really good at centralizing administrative functions and accumulating wealth, they start affording higher tax bases which allows them to project more power which allows them to accumulate even more wealth, a lot of it having to go to enterprising members of the third estate who start corroding the ternary structure from the inside. over the long nineteenth century, the states of western and northern europe gradually dismantle the system of complementary orders, to an (ostensibly) open access meritocratic proprietarian regime, where inequalities are justified on individual prudence and natural endowment.
the first catastrophe of the 20th century is a direct result of the jockeying of these different imperial proprietarian powers. it’s horrors lead into many identitarian and two major types of egalitarian backlash in the interwar period, the former of which sparks another catastrophe less than a generation later. the two models of egalitarianism fail though. the soviet experiment pretty definitively and the social-democratic somewhat less spectacularly. piketty laments the demise of the latter, not least because it births a neo-proprietarian era (roughly, 1980-present) that’s seemingly falling into the same identitarian switch-point that it’s grandfather did. his prescriptions are aimed at transcending the social-democratic model by deepening it: worker co-management of firms; temporizing (socializing?) the ownership of capital; high progressive tax rates, esp. on capital and estate transfers; initial capital endowment in early adulthood and nods to other direct transfer schemes like ubi; and probably most dramatically, vast integration of fiscal and monetary systems. the last is mostly in his polemics contra the eu but the implication i think is global.
a lot of other tidbits but thats the gist. a lot of scholarship in the footnotes, including some verso shoutouts. my girl marion fourcade got a citation, as did katarina pistor, whose book all you guys should check out.
tis a good one, jake seal of approval
