London Review of Books

The Inequality Engine

Geoff Mann

The trouble with ‘taking ideology seriously’, as Piketty puts it, is that
if you aren’t careful, it can easily become the explanation for
everything.

Ideology is an inflationary concept: it tends quite quickly to take
up all the analytical space, so that the only way to get a handle on
it is to claim to occupy some space outside it – which, if we take
ideology seriously, is by definition impossible. Piketty knows full
well the concept isn’t straightforward, and wants to define it from
the off. ‘I use “ideology”,’ he writes in the first few pages, ‘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’s sense of impending calamity is widespread, especially among
what he calls the ‘Brahmin left’, or what Americans call the ‘liberal
elite’:Those who are educated, economically secure and socially
progressive.

Piketty hopes the book will encourage a peaceful, policy-driven
revolution leading to ‘participatory socialism’. It culminates in a
careful proposal for global co-operation on progressive taxation
of wealth, income and carbon...

We learn a good deal about the lengths to which the powerful will
go to assert their privilege.. and about the only things that have ever
thwarted them: mass violence and progressive taxation.