Ostensibly, these chapters focus on slave societies, colonial governance and the Indian caste system. As one chapter title puts it, this part of the book is concerned with the ‘globalisation of inequality’ - or in looking at inequality regimes from a non-European perspective. Part Two of the book juxtaposes this ideal with the reality of European slavery, colonialism and exploitation in the nineteenth century. Ignoring questions of how wealth and power was distributed in society was to provide the foundation for a stable, dynamic liberalism based on unchallengeable property rights. When we left off at the end of Part One of Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology” ( here), the feudal European inequality regime(s) had been substituted - either by reform or revolution - for a new ‘propertarian’ liberalism that in theory made property ownership a right open to to all in society, eliminating arbitrary social distinctions based on fixed social roles.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |