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Capital and Ideology: a critique
Nicolas Brisset
Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, GREDEG, France1
Capital and Ideology is Thomas Piketty's third major work, after Les hauts revenus en France
au XXe siècle (Piketty, 2001) and Capital in the 21st Century (Piketty, 2014). It is both an
extension of the analysis developed in Capital in the 21st Century and a book of policy
recommendations. These recommendations are based on a simple but essential idea: that
inequalities – whether economic (income and wealth), social (e.g., educational) or political
(access to collective decision-making processes) – not only have no natural basis, but are the
result of socio-political constructs. It is therefore important to examine the socio-political
history and analyze the ideological systems which attempted to justify the forms of inequality
specific to different institutional configurations (feudalism, proprietarianism, social
democracy and neo-proprietarianism). The author's first two books have been critiqued. In
this note, I propose to interpret Piketty's latest book as an attempt to respond, somewhat
convincingly, to some of the criticisms made of his previous works.
Ideology and Economics
Capital in the 21st Century gave rise to many discussions among economists. Many of these
were focused on the use of the concept of "capital" in a work devoid of any true theory of
1 The author thanks Muriel Dal Pont Legrand, Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay, Raphaël Fèvre, Jean-Luc Gaffard,
Dorian Jullien and Matthieu Renault for their comments.
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capitalism (Boyer, 2013; Gaffard, 2015; Harvey, 2014; Krusell & Smith, 2015). Capital and
Ideology can be read as a response to this criticism by providing a long-term history of the
relationship between capital accumulation, on the one hand, and the succession of property
regimes on the other: the accumulation of capital can take place because of the existence of
institutional protections of property, which comprise formal institutions (the legal systems)
and informal ones (the ideological systems). These elements together constitute what Piketty
calls an “inequality regime”: “A set of discourses and institutional arrangements intended to
justify and structure the economic, social, and political inequality of a given society” (Piketty,
2020, p. 1043).
The interest of Capital and Ideology lies in the fact that by institutionalizing the
problem of capital accumulation (by considering the economy as embedded in a legal and
ideological system) Piketty rooted the economic dynamics in the institutional dynamics, in the
manner of an author such as John Roger Commons (1924), who told the history of American
capitalism through the evolution of definitions of legal concepts, particularly that of property
(Brisset, 2013). In the process, the author shifts from the concept of "capital" to that of
"property", even though the title of the book retains the term capital. The analysis therefore
should have provided a discussion of this semantic shift, particularly following the debates
over the definition of capital Piketty used in Capital in the 21st Century, taking into account
productive and non-productive capital in an undifferentiated manner (Homburg, 2015;
Bonnet, Bono, Chappelle and Wasmer, 2015; Magness and Murphy, 2015).
The perspective adopted by Piketty indicates a major variation from his earlier work,
which is reflected in the reference to the work of Karl Polanyi (Piketty, 2020: 469-471). Like
Polanyi, Piketty defends the fact that the different property regimes (ternary societies,
proprietarianism, social democracy, neo-proprietarianism) contain contradictions, leading
them to crises. These crises are not so much economic (little mention is made of cyclical
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crises). They emerge from the social sphere. Piketty (2020: 199) mentions three historical
challenges of proprietarian societies: inequalities of wealth and income, colonial inequalities
and, finally, the challenge of nationalism. These challenges are not lethal as such for
accumulation regimes, as long as they are supported by effective ideological systems. These
systems frame, determine and protect the accumulation regimes in the form of discursive
valves. Piketty is explicit about this:
Note, moreover, that while history has given us examples of societies that come close to the
maximal level of income inequality in terms of the top decile’s share […], the story of the top
centile is different. There, the highest top centile shares amount to 20-35 percent of the total
income […], which is of course quite a high level but still quite a bit below the 70-80 percent of
annual output that the top centile could in theory appropriate once average national income
exceeds three to four times the subsistence level […]. No doubt the explanation for this has to do
with the fact that it is no simple matter to build an ideology along with institutions that would
allow such a narrow group just 1 percent of the population, to persuade the rest of society to cede
control of nearly all newly produced resources. (2020: 269)
The emergence and reinforcement of pre-distribution inequalities remains the invariant of
capitalist economic dynamics. When ideology no longer manages to justify the inequalities,
the property system changes. Thus, following, in a rather distant way, the analyses of Karl
Polanyi, but also of Hannah Arendt, Piketty sees the irruption of fascist and communist
regimes as a response to the social contradictions of ownership capitalism: the level of
inequality reached in the Belle Époque became incompatible with the defense of the a priori
emancipatory character of private property. A level of inequality that was mainly due to an
internationalization of industrial capitalism, protected by international free trade agreements,
the gold standard and the balance of power of the Western balance-of-power system.
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Capital Without Capitalism: Property as a Key Concept
Capital and Ideology is based on a dual history: a quantitative history of income and property
inequalities, and a history of the ideological systems that legitimized them through the
emergence of proprietarian society. Is it appropriate to base the entire analytical edifice on the
definition and defense of private property? Here we touch on a central problem of such a
theoretical architecture: the passage from one socio-economic system to another (from one
regime of accumulation to another). Piketty, for example, addresses the problem of the
transition from feudalism to capitalism through political debates on private property. In this
way, the history of capitalism is transformed into the history of property. This reading does
not go without raising a certain number of problems, referring us back to ancient debates on
the nature of the transition from feudal to capitalist regimes, a transition at the heart of
Thomas Piketty's work.
If one considers the history of the transition from feudal to capitalist societies only
through the prism of property, one simply does not understand the emergence of two central
phenomena of capitalism: capital accumulation and economic growth. To what extent have
the behaviors of accumulation and the improvement of production processes become the
driving forces of the economic system since modern property was established? In other
words, it is necessary to understand why, as Piketty (2020: 137) points out, "in reality, capital
is never quiet". Otherwise, historical analysis only presupposes what it is supposed to explain
(Meiksins Wood, 2002).
[C]apitalism can be seen as a historical movement that seeks constantly to expand the limits of
private property and asset accumulation beyond traditional forms of ownership and existing state
boundaries. (Piketty, 2020: 154)
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The birth of this trend must be explained. Piketty states in several places in his book that he
wants to break with "Smithian" history by considering property as a struggle issue and not as
a virtuous institution. Thus, he points to the work of Douglass North and Barry Weingast
(Piketty, 2020: 379, footnote no. 2). However, Piketty himself remains stuck in an approach
that could be described, according to Robert Brenner, as "neo-Smithian": growth remains a
transhistorical trend, i.e. disconnected from the social relations of property (Brenner, 1977).
To take up the case mentioned above, how would the emergence of modern private property
automatically generate a trend towards capital accumulation? In the absence of such an
analysis, successive ideologies seem only to liberate pre-existing tendencies.
By using ideology, Piketty seemed to be able to provide what was missing in his 2013
book, an explanation of the mechanisms of growth and the dynamics of inequality. To do so,
however, the transition from ideology to anthropology should have been studied from a
Weberian perspective.
A loose definition of ideology
A definition of the central concept of ideology is given at the beginning of the book:
It is an attempt to respond to a broad set of questions concerning the desirable or ideal
organization of society. (Piketty, 2020: 3)
The vision of ideology developed here is purely epistemic: it is a discourse answering
questions. Piketty intends to make ideology the engine of history:
Beyond conflicts of interest, which should never be neglected, there were also intellectual
conflicts. (Piketty, 2020, p. 116)2
2 The French version of the text is stronger: “Au-delà des différences d’intérêt, qui ne doivent jamais être
négligées, ce sont également et surtout des conflits intellectuels et cognitifs qui étaient en jeu.” (Piketty, 2019, p.
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However, Piketty ultimately does not deal with ideas, their importance, their effects, or the
struggles to which they are subjected. With few exceptions, Piketty discusses ideological
discourses only through their political and economic manifestations. Thus he has no analysis
of proprietarianism except through the way it is put into action on a few occasions. The
rejection of progressive taxation in Europe in the 19th century, for example, is considered as
such an "ideology", without any analysis of the justifications for this rejection. A true
intellectual history of the notion of property is missing, as can be found, for example, in Ellen
Meiksins Wood's Liberty and Property (Meiksins Wood, 2012), and a history of the
enactment of ideologies, such as can be found in the work of Célestin Bouglé (1899) or Pierre
Rosanvallon (2013).
The absence of the figure of the economist as an ideological producer is on this last
point particularly surprising. Admittedly, Piketty evokes Hayek, Fisher and Friedman, but
economic discourse is never the center of the analysis. Economists have actively participated
in debates about inequality (Breton, 1985; Etner & Silvant, 2017) or taxation (Fausto, 2008;
Orain, 2010), and there is much to be said for a profession whose most important normative
criterion, the Pareto criterion, requires a trade-off between efficiency and equality. The
question of reconciling economic efficiency and social justice is at the heart of many debates,
which are certainly theoretical (Fleurbaey, 2011), but which have direct consequences for the
way in which distributive mechanisms are considered (Piketty, 1994).
In general, much of the work in the history of economic thought is oriented towards the
study of how economists' discourse relates both to other types of discourse (e.g., those of
other social sciences) and to political institutions (Amadae, 2003; Fontaine, 2016). Work that
also questions the social roles of economists throughout history, and in particular the history
of economic expertise (e.g. Brisset & Fèvre, in press ; Levy & Peart, 2017). Economic
147). We could translate it as follows: “Beyond differences of interest, which should never be neglected,
intellectual and cognitive conflicts were also and above all at stake.”
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sociology is now rich in work highlighting the role of economists in the production of
contemporary economic ideology (Fourcade, 2009; Lebaron, 2000), as well as in the social
construction of economies (Callon, 1998 ; Brisset, 2019). A construction that bridges the gap
between ideology and behavior.
Thomas Piketty's work constitutes a mosaic that combines quantitative and intellectual
history. The scale of the task is such that it certainly leaves more doors open than it closes. In
my opinion, this is the greatest merit of the author's approach: calling for a stronger interplay
between economic history, the history of ideas and economic sociology.
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