Revisiting the "Great Levelling": The limits of Piketty's Capital and Ideology for understanding the rise of late 20th century inequality.

In I Capital and Ideology i , Thomas Piketty returns to questions of historical inequality, not merely to fill in the gaps in the earlier, widely circulated and impactful I Capital in the 21st Century i , but to undertake a far more ambitious and nuanced project. Many governments in the developing and postcolonial nations embraced the capital-intensive route to modernity, delaying fighting poverty domestically until such time as when the proceeds of growth would make distribution easier. This critique, which sees property as a foundational element in modern inequality regimes, offers a fruitful conceptual terrain for understanding, for instance, why nations such as France, Britain, and the United States failed to offer any kind of reparations to freed former slaves in the 19th century. The ideal of modernization, which in its various forms, guided the actions of new international agencies, great power governments, and development actors through the postwar era was based on a distinction between "modern" and "traditional" societies. [Extracted from the article]