Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gq7q9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-23T11:32:46.408Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Thomas Piketty in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2017

Nicolas Barreyre
Nicolas Barreyre*
Affiliation:
Centre d’études nord-américaines – EHESS
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This essay proposes a reading of Capital in the Twenty-First Century from a perspective rooted in the nineteenth-century United States. It explores some of the ways that Piketty’s book and its American reception could lead to a reconceptualization of US history. In a feedback loop, this exploration in turn suggests elements that extend and qualify some of Piketty’s conclusions, especially regarding the role of politics in the processes responsible for the growth of inequality under modern capitalism.

Type
Reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 70 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 111 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2015

References

1. Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. See the New York Times list, http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/2014-06-22/hardcover-nonfiction/list.html.

3. Krugman, Paul, “Why We’re in a New Gilded Age,” New York Review of Books, May 8, 2014, 15–18 Google Scholar; Summers, Lawrence H., “The Inequality Puzzle,” Democracy Journal 3 (2014): 91–99 Google Scholar; Schuessler, Jennifer, “Economist Receives Rock Star Treatment,” New York Times, April 19, 2014 Google Scholar.

4. Concerning changes in worldwide economic thinking, see Rodgers, Daniel T., Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 41–76 Google Scholar.

5. On this privileged youth, see Khan, Shamus Rahman, Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

6. Josephson, Matthew, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1934 Google Scholar). For the history of this expression, see John, Richard R., “Robber Barons Redux: Antimonopoly Reconsidered,” Enterprise and Society 13, no. 1 (2012): 1–38 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Fraser, Steve, Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 23–38 Google Scholar; Weil, François, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 143–79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Twain, Mark and Warner, Charles Dudley, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1873)Google Scholar.

9. Edwards, Rebecca, John, Richard R., and Bensel, Richard F., “Forum: Should We Abolish the ‘Gilded Age’?,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8, no. 4 (2009): 461–85 Google Scholar; Edwards, Rebecca, New Spirits: Americans in the “Gilded Age,” 1865–1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 Google Scholar; repr. 2011).

10. Payen-Variéras, Évelyne and Barreyre, Nicolas, “Revisiting the ‘First’ Gilded Age: Business and Politics in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States,” Transatlantica 1 (2013)Google Scholar: http://transatlantica.revues.org/6475.

11. Teachout, Zephyr, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cole, David, “How Corrupt Are Our Politics?,” New York Review of Books, September 25, 2014, 45–48 Google Scholar.

12. A life-story Carnegie delighted in telling himself: Carnegie, Andrew, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920)Google Scholar. For a recent biography, see Nasaw, David, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

13. Barreyre, Nicolas, Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016)Google Scholar, chap. 2.

14. Higgs, Robert, The Transformation of the American Economy, 1865–1914: An Essay in Interpretation (New York: Wiley, 1971)Google Scholar; Atack, Jeremy, Bateman, Fred, and Parker, William N., “The Farm, the Farmer, and the Market,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, ed. Engerman, Stanley L. and Gallman, Robert E., vol. 2, The Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 245–84 Google Scholar.

15. White, Richard, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 109–18 Google Scholar; Miller, George H., Railroads and the Granger Laws (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

16. Hoogenboom, Ari, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865–1883 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961)Google Scholar; Sproat, John G., The “Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Slap, Andrew L., The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

17. Ritter, Gretchen, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America, 1865–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. Nelson, Scott R., A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)Google Scholar; Stanley, Robert, Dimensions of Law in the Service of Order: Origins of the Federal Income Tax, 1861–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

19. Irwin, Douglas A., “Tariff Incidence in America’s Gilded Age,” Journal of Economic History 67, no. 3 (2007): 582–607 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williamson, Jeffrey G., “Watersheds and Turning Points: Conjectures on the Long-Term Impact of Civil War Financing,” Journal of Economic History 34, no. 3 (1974): 636–61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It must be noted that these figures concern American holders. Since a large part of the debt had been refinanced in Europe after the Civil War, a proportion of the capital was in fact making the annuitants of the “old continent” wealthy.

20. Piketty, Capital, 348 sq .

21. Barreyre, Nicolas, “The Politics of Economic Crises: The Panic of 1873, the End of Reconstruction, and the Realignment of American Politics,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 10, no. 4 (2011): 403–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Mehrotra, Ajay K., Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huret, Romain D., American Tax Resisters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 78–172 Google Scholar.

23. Bourdieu, Jérôme, Ferrie, Joseph P., and Kesztenbaum, Lionel, “Vive la différence? Intergenerational Mobility in France and the United States during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 39, no. 4 (2009): 523–57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pope, Clayne, “Inequality in the Nineteenth Century,” in Engerman, and Gallman, , Cambridge Economic History, 2:109–42 Google Scholar; Atack, Jeremy, Bateman, Fred, and Parker, William N., “Northern Agriculture and the Westward Movement,” Cambridge Economic History, 2:285–328 Google Scholar.

24. Shammas, Carole, Salmon, Marylynn, and Dahlin, Michel, Inheritance in America: From Colonial Times to the Present (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Shammas, , A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

25. Piketty, Capital, 158–62.

26. Einhorn, Robin L., American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baptist, Edward E., The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014)Google Scholar.

27. Concerning these elites, see Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary, eds., Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

28. Meinig, Donald W., The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 3–218 Google Scholar; Howe, Daniel Walker, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 701–91 Google Scholar.

29. For that matter, this subject is (surprisingly) only rarely studied by historians. Concerning the fur trade, see the classic work by Wishart, David J., The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807–1840: A Geographical Synthesis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971 Google Scholar; repr. 1992).

30. Lears, Jackson, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 57–71 Google Scholar.

31. Carnegie, Andrew, The Gospel of Wealth (London: F. C. Hagen, 1889)Google Scholar.

32. Zunz, Olivier, Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.