Shortly thereafter, Karl Marx gave ideology an even more negative connotation in his German Ideology. Napoleon abused de Tracy by calling his idea about science, ideology.

Originally developed by French philosopher Comte Destutt de Tracy, ‘ideology as a method of knowledge in social science’ (Klikauer 2017: 83). As a substitute, he tries to get away with a rather ambiguous definition in which ideology means almost anything and nothing at the same time. His book does not deliver a sustained discussion on ideology. He says that ‘I use “ideology” in a positive and constructive sense to refer to a set of a priori plausible ideas and discourses describing how society should be structured’ (23). While Piketty is an expert on economics and inequality, when it comes to the issue of ideology, things get a bit nebulous. Radically, Piketty’s book challenges the l’idée fixe that ‘modern inequality because it is the result of a freely chosen process in which everyone enjoys equal access to the market and to property and automatically benefits from the wealth accumulated by the wealthiest individuals, who are also the most enterprising, deserving, and useful’ (18).Īs a well-trained economist, Piketty starts with a classic line: ‘for the purposes of this book, an inequality regime will be defined as a set of discourses and institutional arrangements intended to justify and structure the economic, social, and political inequalities of a given society’ (21). Instead, the book delivers an impressive amount of empirical evidence and critical analysis on ‘the nature of inequality regimes’ (15) even though, as the author notes rather frequently, inequality regimes are not natural. To an overwhelming extent, Piketty’s Capital and Ideology* – has neither capital nor ideology as core subjects.

Capital ideology piketty