Justice, Power, and Participatory Socialism: on Piketty’s Capital and Ideology
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Martin O’Neill
Abstract
Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology constitutes a landmark achievement in furthering our understanding of the history of inequality, and presents valuable proposals for constructing a future economic system that would allow us to transcend and move beyond contemporary forms of capitalism. This article discusses Piketty’s conceptions of ideology, property, and ‘inequality regimes’, and analyses his approach to social justice and its relation to the work of John Rawls. I examine how Piketty’s proposals for ‘participatory socialism’ would function not only to redistribute income and wealth, but also to disperse economic power within society, and I discuss the complementary roles of redistribution and predistribution in his proposals, and Piketty’s place in a tradition of egalitarian political economy associated with James Meade and Anthony Atkinson. Having elaborated on Piketty’s account of the relationship between economic policy and ideational change, and his important idea of the ‘desacralization’ of private property, I develop ‘seven theses’ on his proposals for participatory socialism, examining areas in which his approach could be enhanced or extended, so as to create a viable twenty-first century version of democratic socialism.
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Title
- Contents
- Editorial
- Symposium on Capital and Ideology
- Accumulating Capital: Capital and Ideology after Capital in the Twenty-First Century
- Ideology and Institutions in the Evolution of Capital
- Is More Mittelstand the Answer? Firm Size and the Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
- Tensions in Piketty’s Participatory Socialism: Reconciling Justice and Democracy
- Justice, Power, and Participatory Socialism: on Piketty’s Capital and Ideology
- More Lessons to Learn: Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology and Alternative Archives of Social Experience
- About Capital, Socialism and Ideology
- General Part
- The Role of Culture in Evolutionary Theories of Human Cooperation
- Discussion: Jonathan Birch, Toolmaking and the Origin of Normative Cognition
- The Skilful Origins of Human Normative Cognition
- If Skill is Normative, Then Norms are Everywhere
- Norms Require Not Just Technical Skill and Social Learning, but Real Cooperation
- The Skill Hypothesis: A Variant
- Normative Guidance, Evaluative Guidance, and Skill
- Refining the Skill Hypothesis: Replies to Andrews/Westra, Tomasello, Sterelny, and Railton
Articles in the same Issue
- Title
- Contents
- Editorial
- Symposium on Capital and Ideology
- Accumulating Capital: Capital and Ideology after Capital in the Twenty-First Century
- Ideology and Institutions in the Evolution of Capital
- Is More Mittelstand the Answer? Firm Size and the Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
- Tensions in Piketty’s Participatory Socialism: Reconciling Justice and Democracy
- Justice, Power, and Participatory Socialism: on Piketty’s Capital and Ideology
- More Lessons to Learn: Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology and Alternative Archives of Social Experience
- About Capital, Socialism and Ideology
- General Part
- The Role of Culture in Evolutionary Theories of Human Cooperation
- Discussion: Jonathan Birch, Toolmaking and the Origin of Normative Cognition
- The Skilful Origins of Human Normative Cognition
- If Skill is Normative, Then Norms are Everywhere
- Norms Require Not Just Technical Skill and Social Learning, but Real Cooperation
- The Skill Hypothesis: A Variant
- Normative Guidance, Evaluative Guidance, and Skill
- Refining the Skill Hypothesis: Replies to Andrews/Westra, Tomasello, Sterelny, and Railton
