I've read in today's
NY Times an op-ed questioning
Piketty's
Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Somehow paradoxically it called in my mind
Anti-Dühring, the famous (some would say infamous, it's up 2 u) book of
Engels. Should I call the op-ed of
Ross Douthat as
Anti-Piketty? Making such an association would make my leftist friends get insane (or make them consider me insane, whichever comes first). Of course,
Anti-Dühring is a very solid book covering philosophy, political economy and socialism (you could read it onLine by
clicking here), while the op-ed of
Ross Douthat is just an op-ed.
Toutes proportions gardées.
The title of the op-ed is
Marx Rises Again (which sounds kind of polemic, to put it mildly). For
Mr. Douthat, the recent book of
Piketty offers no more no less than the narrative for the 21th century Marxian revival, its point being that
the so-called free markets, by their nature, tend to enrich the owners of capital at the expense of people who own less of it: the enrichment of the one percent on the expense of the ninety-none percent.
Mr. Douthat, disagrees with
Piketty's theory. For him,
even as the rich have gotten much, much richer, the 99 percent have shared in growing prosperity in real, measurable ways. And also, even if what happens today might prove the Marxian idea
of everything solid melting into air, actually
what’s felt to be evaporating could turn out to be cultural identity — family and faith, sovereignty and community — much more than economic security.
And
Mr. Douthat concludes,
somewhere in this pattern, perhaps, lies the beginnings of a more ideologically complicated critique of modern capitalism — one that draws on cultural critics like Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch rather than just looking to material concerns, and considers the possibility that our system’s greatest problem might not be the fact that it lets the rich claim more money than everyone else. Rather, it might be that both capitalism and the welfare state tend to weaken forms of solidarity that give meaning to life for many people, while offering nothing but money in their place.
It smells like
social conservatism, you'd say, and you could be right. Anyway
Ross Douthat doesn't make a secret of his conservative convictions. However, the importance of the cultural dimension is not the monopoly of the rightist thinkers. Think at
Gramsci.
I will come back to the book of
Piketty,
Capital in the Twenty-First Century. For now, I invite you to read the article of
Mr Douthat:
(Thomas Piketty)Labels: Piketty
