Capital and Ideology. By Thomas Piketty (trans. Arthur Goldhammer) (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2020) 1093 pp. $39.95 Piketty has long been engaged in a heroic and commendable attempt to bring history and economics into dialogue with each other, and to show how the result can address extremely urgent public policy problems, in particular, the rising inequality within countries and its implications for national political cohesion or solidarity. This volume follows Piketty’s monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2013), and it is even longer (and heavier). The earlier work had a simple message, buttressed by massive statistical work originally focused on France but then extended to a relatively few additional countries. It could be summed up in three characters—r >g. Because the rate of return on capital exceeded the long-run growth rate, capital’s share of income underwent a steady increase. Piketty did not invoke only statistics; he also made fre- quent references to literature, especially Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot (Paris, 1835). The new book is an impressive extension of the theme, with a wider geographical range of statistical material, including many of the non- European countries where Piketty’s work has served to galvanize teams of researchers. Capital and Ideology is more difficult to summarize than Capital in the Twenty-First Century, although the bottom line is still clear and obvious: Ideology matters; it is indeed decisive in shaping the outcome that Piketty described in the 2013 book. Rates of taxation can immediately change r but have little effect on g. What all societies need to do if they are concerned about inequality is to raise taxes. The 2013 book made that point at the conclusion; the 2020 book extends that message into a detailed blueprint for a utopia, or what Piketty terms participatory socialism and social federalism. If the solution to inequality is so easy, however, why do societies resist increasing tax rates? Piketty has a simple historical answer for the nineteenth century—because voting was constructed to be depen- dent on income or wealth (what Piketty calls a “censitary” suffrage). Brit- ain’s exclusive franchise lasted longer than France’s, where the revolution of 1848 and the move to a republic after 1871 brought universal adult male suffrage. Sweden had a highly exclusive and inegalitarian franchise until World War I. Germany had universal male suffrage at a federal level, but since most fiscal decisions were made at a state level, what mattered was the state franchise, and Prussia (the dominant state) had one based on property. In the late twentieth century wave of globalization, the obstacle to effective taxation is the hyper-internationalization of finance, and the fact (which Piketty illuminates brilliantly) that despite the much vaunted avail- ability of big data, governments, central banks, and international institutions © 2021 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. Reviews Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/51/4/640/1890094/jinh_r_01641.pdf by guest on 23 March 2021