Alan Ryan

A Tax on Both Your Houses

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

By Thomas Piketty (Translated by Arthur Goldhammer)

Harvard University Press/The Belknap Press 685pp £29.95 order from our bookshop

In the 19th century, tsarist censors banned John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty while letting through Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Mill’s message was so lucidly expressed that it posed an obvious and immediate threat to the regime; Marx’s prose was clotted and convoluted and his economics littered with leftovers from his youthful enthusiasm for Hegel. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shares its title with Marx’s work but its argumentative verve with Mill’s, and it has been a runaway bestseller in the United States. In spite of the efforts of conservative American economists to persuade their readers that anyone who raises questions about inequalities of income and wealth must be a Marxist, Piketty has no time whatsoever for Marx.

Literary Review

Jun 2014

Alan Ryan

From the Mayflower to Microsoft

Age of Anxiety

Only Connect

Knowledge is Power

Rise of the Middling Sort

Karl’s Way

‘What is to be Done?’

Heroes Of Enterprise

The Moral Scientist

The Danger of Utopia

The Joy Of Thought

Alan Ryan

A Tax on Both Your Houses

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

By Thomas Piketty (Translated by Arthur Goldhammer)

Harvard University Press/The Belknap Press 685pp £29.95 order from our bookshop

Jun 2014

From the Mayflower to Microsoft

Age of Anxiety

Only Connect

Knowledge is Power

Rise of the Middling Sort

Karl’s Way

‘What is to be Done?’

Heroes Of Enterprise

The Moral Scientist

The Danger of Utopia

The Joy Of Thought

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