Jedediah Purdy on Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Economics Is The Master Discipline of our time. You may not think you are interested in economics, but whatever you care about — the environment, the future of the university, race and poverty, or whether independent artists can eat — economics is interested in you.

So a new book just out, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is potentially significant for all of us — especially if, as economists are saying, it’s this decade’s most important book in the field. And it matters that Piketty’s book is revolutionary. It rewrites the mission of economics, discarding claims that the discipline is a super-science of human behavior or public policy. Piketty wants to return his field to what the 19th century called “political economy”: a discipline about power, justice, and — also, but not first — wealth. The questions of political economy are political: how should we freely organize our interdependent economic lives?

Los Angeles Review of Books
Jedediah Purdy on Capital in the Twenty-First Century