The third and final volume in Pierre Nora's award-winning (for Volume I) REALMS OF MEMORY, which includes groundbreaking discussions of France's past, powerfully demonstrates how a nation can both recover and rediscover its identity through remembrance, how rewriting history can forge new paradigms of cultural identity, and how meanings attached to an event can be as significant as the event itself. 146 illustrations.
Thomas Piketty's follow-up to his bestselling work challenges us to rethink politics, ideology, and history in light of persistent inequality. He identifies the ideas that have perpetuated inequality for centuries and critiques the ineffective politics of both the right and left. Piketty asserts that our economy is not a natural phenomenon; rather, markets, profits, and capital are historical constructs shaped by choices. He delves into the material and ideological conflicts among social groups that have led to systems like slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, profoundly affecting billions. Piketty argues that the true driver of human progress has been the quest for equality and education, rather than property rights or stability. He highlights that the extreme inequality that has emerged since the 1980s stems from a backlash against communism, compounded by ignorance and a shift toward the unproductive politics of identity. Understanding these dynamics allows us to envision a more equitable economic and political framework. Piketty advocates for a new "participatory" socialism, rooted in equality, social property, education, and the equitable distribution of knowledge and power.
The latest contribution to one of the most distinguished and important series in political thought in the world.
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.
The second volume of A History of Private Life is a treasure-trove of rich and colorful detail culled from an astounding variety of sources. This absorbing "secret epic" constructs a vivid picture of peasant and patrician life in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. All the mystery, earthiness and romance of the Middle Ages are captured in this panorama of everyday life. The evolving concepts of intimacy are explored--from the semi-obscure eleventh century through the first stirrings of the Renaissance world in the fifteenth century. Color and black-and-white illustrations
Succinct, accessible, and authoritative, Thomas Piketty’s The Economics of Inequality is the ideal place to start for those who want to understand the fundamental issues at the heart of one the most pressing concerns in contemporary economics and politics. This work now appears in English for the first time.
Jacques Le Goff is a prominent figure in the tradition of French medieval scholarship, profoundly influenced by the Annales school, notably, Bloch, Febvre, and Braudel, and by the ethnographers and anthropologists Mauss, Dumézil, and Lévi-Strauss. In building his argument for "another Middle Ages" (un autre moyen âge), Le Goff documents the emergence of the collective mentalité from many sources with scholarship both imaginative and exact.
