PositiveThe Washington Post... neatly summarizes the findings of his two original volumes in a \'mere\' 250 pages of text. Readers will find this work attractive for its brevity alone. But A Brief History of Equality is also a very different kind of book from the first two ... An engaged and clearheaded socialist thinker, Piketty sets forth in A Brief History of Equality one of the most comprehensive and comprehensible social democratic programs available anywhere ... Piketty understands that none of his proposals will be easy to implement. But his reading of politics in the 20th-century West gives him reason to hope ... Hence a key question for Piketty’s 2022 book: Can reducing inequality in the 21st-century world on the same scale as in the 20th-century West be accomplished without another large war, or a pandemic far more destructive than the one we are living through, or a climate catastrophe of the first order? One certainly wants to answer with Piketty that it can. He has laid out a plan that is smart, thoughtful and motivated by admirable political convictions. But a plan of this sort, as Piketty himself showed in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, may not suffice, even when backed by a phalanx of progressive movements. Vast and cruel destruction of life and property, Piketty once wrote, was the critical prelude to the 20th century’s social democratic triumph. Let us hope the world will not require similar death and despair to thrust into existence a 21st-century era of economic and social reconstruction.
