I am in the process of going through Piketty’s newest book, Capital and Ideology. While I am very admiring of Piketty’s decision to refuse the Legion of Honour, there is a profound contradiction between the data that Piketty presents in his two books and their implicit implications, and the explicit meaning he himself has given to the data. Were we living in a kind of censorship like the one attributed to Eastern European communism, I would simply assume that it is a stratagem to outplay the censors; fortunately or not, we are not in that situation, which begs the question: why would the title and data of both books be implicitly reminiscent of Marx’s own work (Capital), yet reject so explicitly the basic tenets of Marxian theory?
