Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T21:41:37.011Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Toward a Political History of Capital?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2017

Nicolas Delalande
Nicolas Delalande*
Affiliation:
Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The interaction between economic analysis and political action is one of the major issues raised by Capital in the Twenty-First Century and by any work of political economy. However, the way this interaction works and changes over time is not always clear in Thomas Piketty’s book. This critical review, informed by history and political science, aims to open up three areas of discussion. Are redistributive tax policies a mere accident, produced by the chaotic history of the twentieth century, and, if so, what might their future be? On what grounds could capitalism’s tendency to create inequality be regulated in the absence of any alternative system? Finally, can deliberative democracy offer any solution, or has it already been profoundly weakened by the very economic processes that Piketty’s brings to the fore in his book? A political history of capital seems more essential than ever.

Type
Reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 70 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 45 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2015

References

1. Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul, Essai sur la répartition des richesses et sur la tendance à une moindre inégalité des conditions (Paris: Guillaumin, 1881)Google Scholar.

2. Scheve, Kenneth and Stasavage, David, “The Conscription of Wealth: Mass Warfare and the Demand for Progressive Taxation,” International Organization 64, no. 4 (2010): 529–61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. This shift in perspective is illustrated by the following, very different works: Hatzfeld, Henri, Du paupérisme à la Sécurité sociale. Essai sur les origines de la Sécurité sociale en France, 1850–1940 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971)Google Scholar; Baldwin, Peter, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 2014), 471 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

5. Ibid., 121–35.

6. See, for example, the following comparative studies of the sociology of tax: Morgan, Kimberley and Prasad, Monica, “The Origins of Tax Systems: A French-American Comparison,” American Journal of Sociology 114, no. 5 (2009): 1350–94 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Prasad, Monica and Deng, Yingying, “Taxation and the Worlds of Welfare,” Socio-Economic Review 7, no. 3 (2009): 431–57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Berman, Sheri, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andersson, Jenny, Between Growth and Security: Swedish Social Democracy from a Strong Society to a Third Way (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Piketty, Capital, 500 and 508.

9. Graetz, Michael J. and Shapiro, Ian, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 221–38 Google Scholar.

10. Huret, Romain D., American Tax Resisters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 110–40 Google Scholar.

11. Leff, Mark, The Limits of Symbolic Reform: The New Deal and Taxation, 1933–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Thorndike, Joseph D., Their Fair Share: Taxing the Rich in the Age of FDR (Washington: Urban Institute Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

12. Steinmo, Taxation and Democracy, 138–44; Zelizer, Julian, Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

13. See, for example, the reading put forward by the American historian Thorndike, Joseph D.: “Piketty is Wrong: Americans Don’t Have a Passion for Equality,” Forbes, May 8, 2014 Google Scholar, http://www.forbes.com/sites/taxanalysts/2014/05/08/piketty-is-wrong-americans-dont-have-a-passion-for-equality/.

14. Martin, Isaac W., The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Martin, , Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. Piketty, Capital, 21: “there is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.”

21. Denord, François, Néo-libéralisme version française. Histoire d’une idéologie (Paris: Demopolis, 2007)Google Scholar.

22. Hobsbawm, Eric J., The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: M. Joseph, 1994)Google Scholar.

23. Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Vision of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944 Google Scholar; repr. 1957).

24. Piketty, Capital, 576.

25. Ibid., esp. 16, 474, and 571.

26. Ibid., 484.

27. From the studies conducted by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron in the 1960s to the latest PISA report published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in December 2013, much research has shown that educational policies also help to reproduce inequalities and social determinisms, especially in the French case. See: Bourdieu, Pierre and Passeron, Jean-Claude, The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture, trans. Nice, Richard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and the analysis of the results for France in the 2012 PISA study, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/PISA-2012-results-france.pdf.

28. Rosanvallon, Pierre, The Society of Equals, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. For discussion of a somewhat comparable case in the French context, see Delalande, Nicolas and Spire, Alexis, “De l’île de Ré à l’île d’Arros. Récits, symboles et statistiques dans l’expérience du bouclier fiscal, 2005-2011,” Revue française de science politique 63, no. 1 (2013): 7–27 Google Scholar.

30. Bartels, Larry, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Gilens, Martin, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 115 and 126Google Scholar. For Gilens, “the public has long opposed the estate tax, and there is no clear evidence that that opposition is misplaced or a product of elite manipulation” (p. 230).

31. For an extension to other social spheres, such as education or employment, see François Dubet’s critical reflections on the rise of the notion of equality of opportunity and the accompanying retreat of the principle of the equality of positions: Dubet, , Les places et les chances. Repenser la justice sociale (Paris: Seuil, 2010)Google Scholar; and more recently Dubet, , La préférence pour l’inégalité. Comprendre la crise des solidarités (Paris, Éd. du Seuil, 2014)Google Scholar.

32. Piketty, Capital, 332 [translation modified].

33. Ibid., 513–14; Hacker, Jacob S. and Pierson, Paul, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – And Turned its Back on the Middle Classes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010)Google Scholar.

34. Culpepper, Pepper, Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

35. Jacobs, Lawrence and Shapiro, Robert, Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Gilens, Affluence and Influence .

36. Bartels, Larry, Page, Benjamin, and Seawright, Jason, “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” Perspectives on Politics 11, no. 1 (2013): 51–73 Google Scholar; Gilens, Martin and Page, Benjamin, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 564–81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.