Thomas Piketty - A Brief History of Equality

A
BRIEF HISTORY

QUALITY

THOMAS PIKETTY

Translated by Steven Rendall

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTSLONDON, ENGLAND2022

Copyright 2022 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

First published in French as Une brve histoire de lgalit

ditions du Seuil 2021

All rights reserved

Cover design by Graciela Galup

978-0-674-27355-9 (cloth)

978-0-674-27588-1 (EPUB)

978-0-674-27589-8 (PDF)

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PRINTED EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Names: Piketty, Thomas, 1971 author. | Rendall, Steven, translator.

Title: A brief history of equality / Thomas Piketty ; translated from the French by Steven Rendall.

Other titles: Brve histoire de lgalit English

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022. | First published in French as Une brve histoire de lgalit, ditions du Seuil, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2021053186

Subjects: LCSH: EqualityHistory. | Social classesHistory. | Income distributionHistory.

Classification: LCC HM821 .P547 2022 | DDC 305.09dc23/eng/20211202

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053186

What you write is interesting, but couldnt you make it a little shorter, so I can share your research with my friends and family?

In part, this book is a response to this question, which has regularly been asked by readers over the years. In the course of the last two decades, I have written three works running to about a thousand pages (each!) concerning the history of inequalities: Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century (2001), Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), and Capital and Ideology (2019). These books are themselves based on a vast international program of historical and comparative research that has led to the publication of several collective reports and studies as well as to the development of the World Inequality Database (WID). The volume of the documentation thereby constituted might well discourage the best-intentioned citizen. It was time for a summation. Here is the result.

However, this book is not limited to a systematic presentation of the main lessons learned from these works. By recapitulating the debates to which these questions have given rise in recent years, it provides a new perspective on the history of inequality based on a strong conviction forged in the course of my research: the advance toward equality is a battle that began long ago and needs only to be continued in the twenty-first century, provided that we all participate in it and that we break with the divisions based on racial or cultural identity and on disciplines that too often prevent us from moving forward. Economic questions are too important to be left to a small class of specialists and managers. Citizens reappropriation of this knowledge is an essential stage in the transformation of power relationships. Naturally, I also hope to convince some of my readers to peruse, one day, the more voluminous works (which, I hasten to say, are very accessible, despite their length!). In the meantime, this short text can be read independently of the others, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the readers, students, and citizens who have encouraged me in this enterprise, and whose questions have enriched this work. This book is dedicated to them.

1. . The editions in English are: A. B. Atkinson and T. Piketty, eds., Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); A. B. Atkinson and T. Piketty, Top Incomes: A Global Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); F. Alvaredo, L. Chancel, T. Piketty, E. Saez, and G. Zucman, World Inequality Report 2018 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018); A. Gethin, C. Martnez-Toledano, and T. Piketty, eds., Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021). Many texts and materials proceeding from this research are available on these websites: wid.world, wpid.world, and piketty.pse.ens.fr.

This book offers a comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies. Or rather, it offers a history of equality, because, as we shall see, there has been a long-term movement over the course of history toward more social, economic, and political equality.

This is not, of course, a peaceful history, and still less a linear one. Revolts and revolutions, social struggles and crises of all kinds play a central role in the history of equality reviewed here. This history is also punctuated by multiple phases of regression and identitarian introversion.

Nonetheless, at least since the end of the eighteenth century there has been a historical movement toward equality. The world of the early 2020s, no matter how unjust it may seem, is more egalitarian than that of 1950 or that of 1900, which were themselves in many respects more egalitarian than those of 1850 or 1780. The precise developments vary depending on the period, and on whether we are studying inequalities between social classes defined by legal status, ownership of the means of production, income, education, national or ethno-racial originall dimensions that will interest us here. But over the long term, no matter which criterion we employ, we arrive at the same conclusion. Between 1780 and 2020, we see developments tending toward greater equality of status, property, income, genders, and races within most regions and societies on the planet, and to a certain extent when we compare these societies on the global scale. If we adopt a global, multidimensional perspective on inequalities, we can see that, in several respects, this advance toward equality has also continued during the period from 1980 to 2020, which is more complex and mixed than is often thought.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, there has been a real, long-term tendency toward equality, but it is nonetheless limited in scope. We shall see that different inequalities have persisted at considerable and unjustified levels on all these dimensionsstatus, property, power, income, gender, origin, and so onand, moreover, that individuals often face inequalities in combination. To assert that there is a tendency toward equality is not to brag about success. Instead, it is to call for continuing the fight on a solid, historical basis. By examining how movement toward equality has actually been produced, we can learn precious lessons for our future and better understand the struggles and mobilizations that have made this movement possible, as well as the institutional structures and legal, social, fiscal, educational, and electoral systems that have allowed equality to become a lasting reality. Unfortunately, this process of collective learning about equitable institutions is often weakened by historical amnesia, intellectual nationalism, and the compartmentalization of knowledge. In order to continue the advance toward equality, we must return to the lessons of history and transcend national and disciplinary borders. The present workwhich belongs to the domains of history and the social sciences, and is both optimistic and progressiveseeks to move in that direction.

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