PositiveThe Sydney Review of BooksPiketty’s work heralds the return of political economy as the centerpiece of economic analysis and, along with it, the historical perspective such an analysis demands ... The twin pillars of Piketty’s return to political economy are articulated as a pair of twin needs: the need for big data and for the long view. Zeitgeist or conjuncture, take your pick: Capital in the Twenty-First Century is central to it ... Cards on the table: I am totally sympathetic to Piketty’s work, even if it has the effect of empirically demonstrating something most of us already know – namely, that economic inequality is not a natural affliction but a historical consequence. And it is interesting to note how quickly his work has become orthodoxy for an ecumenical left. In his recent Alan Saunders Memorial Lecture devoted to the history of liberty, the philosopher Philip Pettit casually dropped an ‘as we now know from Piketty …’ into his talk, endorsing the view that inequality is an economic phenomenon that demands a political solution. What I am ambivalent about here is the rhetorical significance of this ‘we now know’. In other words, it is striking how quickly the political imperative can become the empirical told-you-so. And whether one is sympathetic to the imperative is irrelevant. It seems that one duty of the historian is to remain vigilant in maintaining that the relationship between the political imperative and the empirical told-you-so is fraught at best.
