Into the muck

Thomas Piketty memorably broke into wide consciousness in 2013 with Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which became required reading for Occupy Wall Street and the other protest movements that had proliferated in cities around the world in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008. It gave academic and empirical backing to what grassroots activists had intuited, namely that levels of inequality had reached levels not seen since the early twentieth century. Piketty’s bulkier follow-up to that unlikely best-seller, Capital and Ideology (2020), was more ambitious and powerful, and yet it was greeted with less fanfare. Time for Socialism (2021) gathers his political columns from Le Monde, many in English translation for the first time.