A VERY PRELIMINARY BOOK REPORT WHILE I WAIT FOR WHOLE FOODS DELIVERY

The new Piketty book, Capital and Ideology, landed on my desk today with a thud, all 1093 pages of it.  I have now plowed through the first eight pages and I am prepared to offer a preliminary opinion [no one ever accused me of being a scholar!]  It looks to me to be a sophisticated, massive, cross-cultural twenty-first century elaboration of the Historical Idealism through whose heart Marx spent his life trying to drive a stake.  To illustrate my reasons for this judgment, I am going to ignore the protests of my two forefingers and laboriously hunt and peck into this blog post a lengthy selection from pages 7-8, the outer limit of the portion of the book I have read thus far.  Bear with me.  This is going to take a while.

This comes from a subsection of the Introduction titled “Taking Ideology Seriously.”  [Piketty has already explained, way back on page 3, “I take ‘ideology’ in a positive and constructive sense to refer to a set of a priori plausible ideas and discourses describing how society should be structured.”]  Piketty writes:

“Inequality is neither economic nor technological: it is ideological and political.  This is no doubt the most striking conclusion to emerge from the historical approach I take in this book.  In other words, the market and competition, profits and wages, capital and debt, skilled and unskilled workers, natives and aliens, tax havens and competitiveness – none of these things exist as such.  All are social and historical constructs, which depend entirely on the legal, fiscal, educational, and political systems that people choose to adopt and the conceptual definitions they choose to work with.  These choices are shaped by each society’s conception of social justice and economic fairness and by the relative political and ideological power of competing groups and discourses.  Importantly, this relative power is not exclusively material; it is also intellectual and ideological.  In other words, ideas and ideologies count in history.  They enable us to imagine new worlds and different types of society.  Many paths are possible.”

Note well the use of the verb “to choose” in the middle sentence of this passage.

Then, after a de rigueur paragraph contra the conservatives, Piketty continues:  “Nevertheless, the approach taken in this book – based on ideologies, institutions, and the possibility of alternative pathways – also differs from approaches sometimes characterized as ‘Marxist,” according to which the state of the economic forces and relations of production determines a society’s ideological ‘superstructure’ in an almost mechanical fashion.  In contrast, I insist that the realm of ideas, the political-ideological sphere, is truly autonomous.”

After another bit adorned with the phrase “more or less mechanical” [my fingers are giving out], Piketty wraps up a long paragraph with the brave statement, “Clearly stating the alternatives may be more useful in transcending capitalism than simply threatening to destroy it without explaining what comes next.”

I am tempted merely to sigh and move on, but before I do, let me offer one observation [it remains to be seen how much further into the book I will manage to plod.]  I trust you all recall my 9000 word review of Piketty’s first book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a book I very much admired.  The central thesis of that book, which ran counter to the received wisdom in the academic Economics profession, was that the roughly 30 year period of reduced economic inequality following World War II was not the new normal of mature capitalism nor a consequence of the victory of a more enlightened ideology [in Piketty’s “positive and constructive” sense] but rather was a temporary anomaly caused by the destruction of physical and financial capital during the Great Depression and the War, an anomaly that was rapidly being replaced by ever-greater inequality in every advanced capitalist country regardless of its ideological and political “choices.”

I take Piketty’s new book to be a Giant Leap Backward.

Stay tuned.