Piketty Review Essay

Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, 2020

Using the unprecedented 2014 Science special issue on inequality as a conceptual guide, this article examines the recent return of an assortment of fatalist arguments which claim that high levels of economic inequality are a natural, inevitable, and basic characteristic of human civilization and that, therefore, it would be incredibly difficult and damaging—if not impossible—to significantly reduce such income and wealth gaps. Classifying these varying arguments into four natural “laws” of inequality—mathematical, neoclassical, historical, and genetic—this article seeks to unpack the internal logic and external politics of such claims by placing them in their broader historical context. In so doing, this article will also show how certain aspects of Thomas Piketty’s earlier work played a key—albeit unintended—role in the recent renaissance in naturalizing inequality. In conclusion, this article reflects on other aspects of Piketty’s analysis that can be used to “denaturalize” inequality and reveal its highly contingent, political, structural, and institutional basis. Finally, the article will end with a call for historians of capitalism to pick up the denaturalizing mantle and seek to explicitly disprove and challenge the contention that high levels of inequality are all but inevitable.

Monthly Review, 2014

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 1994

2014

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 1994

History, 2018

2014

Allegra - A Virtual Lab of Legal Anthropology, 2014

These are wild times and people have wild luck. Fortunes have been made, unmade, and taken away due to a severe shift within the capitalist world system, which became manifest to the wider public as a result of the so-called financial crisis that began in 2008. Since then, an understanding of capitalism as a rather unsustainable way of being human has been gaining significant traction within the social sciences. One of capitalism’s most powerful guises is, however, to dress luck and fortune as fate. In “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, Thomas Piketty takes on what is probably the most significant twentieth century theorem in the academic ivory-tower inhabited by economists: Simon Kuznets’ 1950s theory that “income inequality would automatically decrease in advanced phases of capitalist development, regardless of economic policy choices or other differences between countries, until eventually it stabilized at an acceptable level” (Piketty 2014, 11).

The Contradictions of Capital in the Twenty-First Century