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Home , Frankfurt School, Louis Althusser

Chapter 6 Piketty and Patrimonialism: A School of Piketty’s Use of Marx, Weber, Political , and Comparative Historical

J. I. (Hans) Bakker

“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the ­fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”— Letter of March 18, 1872 from London by to Citizen Maurice La Châtre, cited in ’s Reading .1

Introduction

One of the best recent attempts to re-orient “” to more funda- mental questions having to do with social class and income inequality is the ­widely-discussed book by “political ” Thomas Piketty. Piketty is a “liberal” intellectual and not a “radical” of either the Left or the Right.2 His work goes further than more journalistic accounts of recent trends.3 But it does not go far enough in terms of and “historical .”

1 Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Jacques Rancière and , : The Complete Edition (Trs. and Eds.) Ben Brewster and David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015), p. 9. [This translation is the first Complete Translation in one volume based on the third French edition of 1996. The first edition dates back to 1965. The complex publishing is detailed, 1–8.] Hereafter Althusser Reading Capital. 2 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Har- vard University Press, 2014), pp. 447–451. Belknap Press is associated with Harvard Univer- sity Press. Harvard spends approximately US$ 100 million a year to manage its endowment of $30 billion, the largest university endowment of any university in the world. See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2014), pp. 447–451. 3 Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. “Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States since 1913.” Presentation to the 2016 Allied ­ Associations annual meeting, San Francisco, Calif., Jan. 3–5. {Accessed Novem- ber 22, 2016 at http://piketty.pse.ens/fr/files/pikettysaezzucman2015dina.pdf} An example of a more journalistic account is Robert B. Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004357044_008 Piketty and Patrimonialism 109

He does not deal, for example, with the kinds of arguments put forward by Marxists in France.4 In some ways, the fact that Piketty is very well versed in Neo- and yet does not see contemporary econometrics as the of wisdom is exactly what makes him so acceptable to so many. He has opened up “economics” and made the study of wealth rather than just “equilibrium” relevant again. He argues that the disparity between the top one percent and the bottom ninety-nine percent has grown considerably in most European countries and the United States. His data sets span more than one hundred years. His writing style is straightforward and comprehensible with no of required. All of the essays in this book are in- spired by the fact that Piketty and his colleagues have opened up a window to discussions that were often ignored in the discipline of economics but that were not widely appreciated elsewhere either. He touches on topics that many sociologists have discussed. But he himself does not make specifically sociological arguments except in so far as he touch- es on some sociological ideas found in Marx. Of course, he is not a sociologist. What he did in political economy is admirable. He utilizes the techniques of Neo-classical economic modeling but changes key assumptions. His contribu- tion is significant. But precisely because it is so good we need to take the limita- tions seriously as well. Many key classical theorists in the social sciences have been influenced by political economy but have taken those ideas in different directions. Piketty has been critiqued in many different ways, but the contribution this chapter seeks to make is to examine his overall assumptions about exploitation,

Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). Reich has a knack for taking complex arguments and stating them in ways that allow his books to reach a wide audience. 4 “Of course, we have all read, and all do read . … But someday it is necessary to read Das Kapital to the letter” Althusser Reading Capital, op cit., 11. Althusser died at age seventy-two in 1990 after having been suddenly rejected almost universally because he (accidentally?) strangled his wife on November 16, 1980. For a long time, his work was taboo; but there is still great respect for his graduate students and many academics were influenced by his ideas, including fellow Algerian . Thomas Piketty would definitely have known about the details of the Althusserian oeuvre when he wrote his own book. Althusser is famous for postulating an epistemological break between the and the mature Marx of Capital. The so-called School of Economics provides what could be called a Neo-Althusserian analysis of how the taken-for-granted of increases inequality in a way that is not simply evident to human be- ings who are embedded in capitalist , processing, exchange and distribution.