Thomas Piketty: “Neoliberalism is dead since 2008”

Interviewed by Markos Karasarinis

Thomas Piketty differs from the image of an economist we have been used to in the past thirty years. He does not believe in an economics closed off from social science, does not accept the powers of deregulation and probably contributed more than anybody to the return of  "capitalism" instead of  "market economy" in everyday parlance. The 50-year old professor of EHESS and London School of Economics became a household name in 2014 with Capitalism in the 21st Century (in Greek from Polis Editions), a work combining statistic evidence and narrative to document the inexorable rise of inequality after 1980 that became an unexpected global best seller. In his new book Capital and Ideology (upcoming in the fall from Patakis Editions) he adopts an approach that combines economics and social science in order to describe "inequality regimes", in other words the ideological legitimization of inequality since Early Modern times. At the same time the book chronicles the rise of "hypercapitalism", the failure of social democracy, its transformation to a "brahmin left" of highly educated elites and the emergence of a "nativist right", and outlines in detail his own proposal for the formation of a "participatory socialism". All this resting not just on statistics, historical, literary and even cinema sources, but also on a wealth of comparative evidence collected from non-European societies as Brazil, India and China. "To Vima" talked with the French economist on the wide range of subjects this superb book raises.

Capital and Ideology offers a wealth of possible readings: a history of inequality, a global survey of its justifications, an...