"Revisiting the "Great Levelling

In Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty returns to questions of historical inequality, not merely to fill in the gaps in the earlier, widely circulated and impactful Capital in the 21st Century, but to undertake a far more ambitious and nuanced project. Critics (Bhambra & Holmwood, 2018; Moeller, 2016) pointed out that in the previous book, Piketty's consideration of the role of high concentrations wealth on inequality focused largely on a handful of relatively wealthy countries (the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan). More importantly, it did not consider the political and economic relationships, forged by European colonization and the trans-Atlantic slave trade that helped to create lasting inequalities in wealth, status, education, and life expectancy around the globe. These oversights corresponded to significant methodological gaps, in which inequalities defined by social status and identity, including gender, race, and caste, were largely left out of considerations that centered around economic and material disparities. Yet, these different forms of inequalities are intimately connected, as gender wage gaps and racial wealth gaps in different parts of the world attest. Capital and Ideology sets out to rectify both sets of criticisms and in doing so, offers a refreshingly large lens on the historical creation, stabilization, and reformation of systems of inequality. The book covers an impressively varied set of social and historical topics, from the creation of feudal regimes of property in 11th century France, to the exploitation of slave labor in plantation economies in the Americas and the stabilization of caste hierarchies under colonial rule in India. Despite its incredible scope, range, and ambition, Capital and Ideology once again brings into sharp focus the great economic transformations that took place in the middle of the 20th century, contrasting these with rising inequality in our times. According to Piketty (2020, p. 20), the "most worrisome structural changes facing us today [include] the revival of inequality nearly everywhere since the 1980s." As his work here and elsewhere explains, the extreme material and social disparities of the Gilded Age were dramatically rolled back by war, global depression, and the creation of modern welfare systems, contributing to a "Great Levelling" of economic inequalities in many countries. Starting in the late 1970s however, the central features of social democratic governance (including progressive taxation and financial market regulation) start to unravel. We can see the results all around us, evidenced by the dramatic rise of the top decile's share of national income across Europe, North America, India, China, and Brazil (OECD, 2011; Piketty, 2020). What accounts for the limits and failures of mid-century welfarist experiments? Capital and Ideology examines the creation of what Piketty terms "ownership societies" that valued and maintained high concentrations of private wealth, along with their brief reversal in the mid-20th century (aided by new instruments of social democracy, including the nationalization of key infrastructures and services, public education, health and pension reforms, and progressive taxation). Despite the "undeniable successes" of these social democratic states (largely speaking here of Western Europe and to a lesser extent the United States), such schemes "began to run into trouble in the 1980s" (Piketty, 2020, p. 486). Why? Piketty points to three causes: a) the failure to implement more ambitious power-sharing and public ownership within firms, b) the inability to provide truly equal educational structures and opportunities, and c) the failure, politically as well as institutionally, to protect and expand the progressive taxation of wealth. Yet as historians, we remain puzzled. Are these causes of failure? They might perhaps be read as parts of a cautionary tale, which point concerned readers and policymakers toward instruments for redressing current trends in expanding inequalities. But as arguments about historical causation, they are scant and give us few clues as to how to read the long 20th century-its successes along with its many tragedies. According to Piketty, these diagnosed failings of mid-century welfare strategies point mostly to the limited ambitions of leaders, scholars, and political thinkers. Except for a few cited exceptions-namely Sweden and Germany-he argues that policies for public ownership, education, and taxation simply did not go far enough and were not supported, ideologically, by strong enough visions of economic and social inclusion. Gradually, older ideologies of ownership societies erode reformist progress, allowing for capital flight, privatization of public services, and a steep drop in tax rates for top income brackets. Yet the period in question, starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, also gave rise to incredibly important battles for greater social and economic inclusion, whether these were movements for racial, sexual, and gender rights in Europe and North America, anti-dictatorship struggles in Latin America, opposition to communist authoritarianism in the Soviet bloc, or against the marginalization of minority ethnic communities in Asia and Africa. From the rise of Second Wave feminism, the civil rights and the Black power movement in the United States to the Biafran War, workers' strikes in Chile, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and political opposition to Indira Gandhi's Emergency in India-the last decades of the 20th century gave voice and visibility to countless battles for racial and gender justice and for economic inclusion. These struggles (and the crises of that period) were not simply arguments in favor of more ambitious welfare schemes. They were also indictments of the blind spots and structural limitations of the forms that welfare and social democratic inclusion had taken during the first decades after the war. This inclusion, we argue, following the work of critics such as Kathi Weeks and Nancy Fraser, made "work" the primary grounds for recognition in the welfare state (Fraser, 2013; Weeks, 2011). On the one hand, the idea of the worker as citizen helped to knit together postwar societies, creating consent, and support for progressive taxation and public welfare provisions (Mau, 2004). On the other hand, this productivist emphasis (Maier, 1977) valued the labor of some while discounting the labor of others, and served as a pre-condition for erecting new (racialized and gendered) barriers for women, immigrants, ethnic minorities, people of color and gay and transgender people, and their inclusion in the opportunities created by postwar social democracies. Recognizing these relationships allows us to more constructively revisit the turn point of the 1970s and to remap historical trends in rising inequality (Wirsching et al., 2011). This article will be divided into three parts. After a brief overview of Piketty's broader scholarly project in Capital and Ideology, we next turn to an examination of welfare policies in the United States and Western Europe to understand how the new social, political, and economic configurations of the postwar period effectively excluded important groups and constituencies who helped to build the prosperity of the period. We demonstrate how the model of the Western welfare state (which Piketty both critiques and seeks to expand) was built on a series of internal contradictions and exclusion that need to be critically examined, in order to understand what this model might offer in terms of contemporary policy and where its structural gains should to be relativized and reframed. The next section will examine this same period from a more global perspective. We argue that the history of the emergence of welfare states must place postwar reconstruction and redistribution in Europe and North America within broader global patterns of exploitation, extraction, and distribution. During this period, many parts of the Global South and the newly decolonized world tried to imagine alternative configurations, from Bandung to the NIEO, for organizing systems of ownership, industry, economic opportunity, and prosperity, while critiquing the unequal systems of power, control, and structural protections that perpetuated First World wealth and privilege. In doing so, we wish to highlight two arguments. First, it is important to see that the eventual unraveling of welfare structures was not simply a product of internal failures or the lack for more robust participatory schemes. Rather, the success of neoliberal economic ideologies and transformations depended, in part, on the contradictions and structural exclusions of welfarism. The unraveling of welfare protections were not simply the result of ideological and class contests, but also due to the structural limits of welfarism and the global exhaustion of models that could not adequately contend with growing demands for greater civil and political rights and social recognition. This brings us to our second argument. As we lay out below, it is important to recognize that every system and discursive frame for organizing and legitimating inclusion is also a system of exclusion. The ideological terms of inclusion create important boundaries, establishing new arguments about which members of society deserve protection and which do not "yet" qualify. In order to understand the failures of the past, and to avoid simple triumphalist visions of equality, we must carefully attend to who is excluded, how, and under what terms, even as we aspire to build more inclusive societies in the future. Capital and Ideology is an expansive project, covering nearly 600 years of global history. And it is not simply the historical range and geographical focus that have shifted, in comparison to his earlier work. In this new approach, Piketty gives a far more expansive account of how inequality regimes are created, maintained, and challenged over time. In comparison to many recent broad-scale accounts of global inequality (Milanović, 2016; Scheidel, 2018), Piketty's book does not rely on the role of catastrophes, the pressures of resource scarcity, or the operation of market allocation to explain how and why hierarchies are formed or transformed. Instead, he is clear in saying that inequalities are created by social and political choices. They are made through human agency, rather than being dictated by external pressures. The new book lies also in marked contrast to Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century (2014). In that earlier work, he outlined various "laws" of capitalist accumulation, exploring what appeared to be inherent, market driven tendencies toward high levels of wealth accumulation in the top strata of societies. Policies, according to this framing, are constantly doing battle with an inherent propensity toward high rates of return on capital and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. In the latest book, Piketty makes a rather different argument, in which inequality is shaped not by mechanical forces of accumulation, but by human commitments, policies, understandings, and organization. Simply put, inequality is something that societies make. It is here that Piketty turns to ideology-as a set of beliefs and practices that are negotiated and subject to change-as the central driver and shaper of what he calls "inequality regimes." While the idea of ideology is thinly formulated (lacking the materialist underpinnings that this term rests upon in the theories of Marx, Lukács or the Frankfurt School), it nevertheless does some important conceptual and historical work and moves us away from the notion that levels of inequality are simply dictated by the stage of a society's development. In many popular accounts of inequality's rise and fall, history is deployed merely as background, helping to display an obvious, natural progression across time from more hierarchical societies (marked by feudal obligations, slavery, and indenture) to democratic ones (in which citizens enjoy not only political equality but also greater social security, education, and labor market access). This book gives us a much more complicated account of the past, one in which history is dictated not by scarcity but by moral and political choices at every step. The turn to ideology allows for a more complicated, less linear account of "progress." It underwrites, for instance, a more serious and considered account of recent reversals in economic inequality, as the product of different sets of historical commitments-and the emergence of a new kind of market liberalism focused on the individualization of opportunities and risk. Rather than the patterned logic of Kuznets curves (or Kuznets waves in the analysis of Milanović), here Piketty argues that there is nothing inevitable about progress. Trends in inequality (measured largely in terms of material distributions) can reverse course or undergo radical revision, sometimes in very short time frames. Piketty's book, through an expansive long durée account, ends on a hopeful note, despite the trend of rising economic inequality in recent decades. If political and moral frameworks, choices, and commitments shape inequality regimes, we can choose different paths forward, guided in part by historical moments during which economic inequalities were successfully reversed, when shared institutions, structures, and policies prevailed. Yet, despite its scope and new historical emphasis, the argument in important ways remains tied to concerns and understandings that marked the first book. Both emphasize the role of property as an economic, fiscal, moral, and social organizing force that comes to have a deep and enduring impact in shaping inequality regimes, past, and present. Similarly, both books share a liberal optimism, arguing that social science, mass education, power-sharing, and democratic inclusion can diminish high levels of inequality. While calling our attention to the extremely serious social and political consequences of unchecked economic accumulation, Piketty remains confident that rising inequality is a problem to which solutions can (and have) been fashioned. We wish to look more carefully and critically at these claims, to understand what this account of inequality regimes leaves out of the analysis. In Capital and Ideology, the central organizing thread is property and the proprietarian logics that mark various inequality regimes across time. In Western Europe, war and economic depression led to the dismantling of accumulated wealth and privilege, and saw better redistribution of income and wealth than previous centuries. In the process, millions gained access to greater security, better education, and new economic opportunities. In Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty's central concern-the tendency of private capital to accumulate in the hands of a few-mapped onto a dynamic that was social and political as well as economic. If r > g, the security of those who own capital expands over time, potentially creating a permanent rentier class, while undermining the economic position and social standing of people who rely on labor alone to provide for themselves and their families. This central struggle, between labor and capital, sets up a profound tension that runs through the new book as well. Proprietarian logics, we are told, are responsible for many of the worst forms of political abuse and economic exploitation, from aristocratic regimes of early modern Europe to the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the development of modern industrialization in the West. Property unfairly advantaged certain groups of people over others and served as an ideological lynchpin that defined fairness and inclusion (predicated on ownership rather than citizenship). This critique, which sees property as a foundational element in modern inequality regimes, offers a fruitful conceptual terrain for understanding, for instance, why nations such as France, Britain, and the United States failed to offer any kind of reparations to freed former slaves in the 19th century. The right to compensation for lost property trumped the violated human rights of former slaves. However, this focus on proprietarian ideologies also valorizes, in an uncritical way, the one moment in this historical account where the relationship to property is rolled back-the postwar period and the successes of Euro-American welfare states. It does not spend much time trying to investigate structural flaws of these states, which replaced the logic of proprietarian power with a new emphasis on worker-citizens (who were also frequently framed as White, male bread winners). The next two sections of this article examine closely the ways in which emerging postwar welfare states excluded large groups of people, while simultaneously relying on their unpaid or undervalued work. The first section will look at the exclusionary structures of postwar welfare, especially in the West, while the following section will examine how the long shadows of colonial rule and decolonization, which called into question how the postwar global system organized and ideologically framed inclusion. The creation of welfare states in Western Europe and North America helped to share the risks and rewards of postwar recovery, and reduced economic inequality. Yet, many were not adequately included within its provisions. Piketty shows in Capital and Ideology that these schemes often did not go far enough; with the cited exceptions of Sweden and Germany, few countries created robust power and equity sharing institutions to help distribute corporate rewards or prevent capital flight. The provisions of welfare safety nets were inadequate in other ways, failing to cover all members of societies equally. In North American and Europe, women, racial minorities, guest workers, and immigrants either did not benefit to the same extent, or were actively excluded from education, healthcare, housing support, government-backed financial services, and pensions schemes. Instead of locating our in the limited ambitions of the welfare we to the model arguing that the model not only tied rights to but also some forms of labor over many and other have whether such provisions were exclusionary by or whether forms of and the of more As with the such arguments set up a They the historical by which support for the welfare starting with the was in the United The of educational and to and appeared in the to provide equal support on for minority However, for these was by actively As a while Black the same as their institutions and served and as a Black and far As explains, the democratic for tax structures and were also to the color We see in other welfare states, in which minorities, immigrants, and less support and despite the emergence this period of better education, and healthcare, and more social The of these can be even today through racial and minority gaps in wealth, and many including the United States, United Kingdom, France, and In after these failed to and other of the to the same extent as they did groups in If postwar while creating new institutions and of support, did not one up it is also important to look at the terms through which inequality was framed in different parts of the It is to imagine that the terms of inclusion were limited or by older structures of exclusions or historical but the are often more complicated than social we to attention to the ways that different welfare regimes (in the of a often sharp between and between citizens and between the economic and the and between and modern that postwar welfare states organized inclusion in the welfare state was through the of the idea of and new ways of of especially around The emergence of the as a global of in social policy was for expanding welfare systems around the globe. It helped to set expand and and create for 2013; as explains, with a range of mid-century welfare from wage to On the one hand, they helped to the social security to millions of people who had such support On the other hand, they attention toward the economic and away from a focus on the top of the social and of inequality and the same time, as in work on the history of postwar such were part of a by which citizens were as welfare could be in access to and that was education, or As a some of the other ways of social inclusion and were in for of progress. This remains even when the away from to of and rather than to set and other important Piketty's book the of structures of social democracy, but in order to understand why and how democratic and power-sharing structures limited in the postwar one must look carefully at the terms in which inclusion and equality were being framed during this period 2020). If welfare systems largely their own provisions through a lens (in order to levels of healthcare, and the right to welfare the of the 20th century, in the of work and labor This is to the rising starting in the period, of national income (and as the important for the and health of the As in the of Germany, the to imagine and account for the national a helped to frame 20th century more After World the to and in rates of economic into of postwar and in different nations and helped to political accounts of the success or failure of policies The of national income was largely during the period as a of labor 2011). According to one of the primary of the income was merely a for the of the labor income as the primary of failed to account for large of and work was but were not by This was a problem that Kuznets and one that he this to for contemporary since at wage might short when the labor of many people the of tax In the process, not only helped to but also the of the national safety nets were around new and inclusion was framed in terms of and labor the of or those who were to work in the inclusion, while expansive in comparison to the turn of the century Piketty was also on structural and on some forms of labor while the of other from the work of many of Western welfare states, have that for social security, and public help to labor They from the of labor compensation by wage and risks with and But as and social have pointed even robust welfare schemes impact the of very than their male In a society such as with and the welfare state the of it for to the labor force in In Germany, which less and than the state in more out of the In the process, the rise of income as a primary for about and for inclusion in the welfare safety had profound consequences for how societies and the labor of social and social 2011). The of the welfare starting in the in the was on a of the This often that policymakers and national to understand and that under different logics, including large or ones in which labor and were central to These also against women, male and those As many have the postwar period in Europe and North America women, who had taken important the during out of the market while such exclusions middle class more than their class the to work in large of the labor of across the class and The idea of the centered around a male and a helped to pension and for and families. The well for instance, and by in of the the ways in which were by who were primary the same of support by These as and other have against even as they appeared to give they were on structures that both and perpetuated the lack of financial for women, as financial of in the United States were to accounts or out for housing or male members the 1970s could not pension or other important protections to or at unequal inclusion, created by the postwar economic is to The postwar of the a for that was by movements of If this was from by the war it to millions of from former and from to the and the of this period of of labor force and of was

Capital (architecture · Caste · Colonialism · Development economics · Economic inequality · Economics · Egalitarianism · Ideology · Inequality · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Racism · Social inequality · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Income, Poverty, and Inequality · Law · Political Economy and Marxism

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