TIPPING POINT.

HISTORY of economics; ECONOMIC history; MARXIAN economics; NEOCLASSICAL school of economics; INTERNATIONAL competition; SHAREHOLDER activism

When one of the moderators asked him if he believed in the prospects of the Grand Soir - the Great Evening, or the notion of an inevitable workers' revolution that has inspired generations of French leftists - Piketty fired back, "The Grand Soir is great, but it's the morning after that interests me most." He unpacks the concentration of wealth in colonial and slaveholding societies like British-occupied India, French-controlled Algeria, and prerevolutionary Haiti (which was, in 1780, the world's most unequal society, according to Piketty). While Marx and Engels argued that the underlying material conditions and class structure of a given society held the key to understanding the resilience (or, for that matter, the fragility) of its political system, Piketty has a very different read on how authority reproduces itself. For example, the 19th century proprietarian order had its roots, Piketty argues, in what was originally a very simple goal: the separation of the state's authority - the provision of security and laws and a monopoly on violence - from the individual's right to hold and sell property. [Extracted from the article]

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