Thomas Piketty ends his latest book, Capital and Ideology, where he

wants to set off: in a collective debate on the course of our societies. The

ultimate goal of the book is “to enable citizens to reclaim possession of

economic and historical knowledge” (1041) in order to effectively par-

ticipate in public debate. This knowledge is twofold: on the actual tra-

jectory of measured inequalities across human societies and on the way

we, as societies past and present, make sense of them. To do so, Piketty

chronicles the history, legacy and future of “inequality regimes” across

time and space in a highly interactive way. These span the feudal “ter-

nary societies” up to the 1800s, the “proprietarian societies” (or “own-

ership societies”) up to 1914, the “slave and colonial societies” span-

ning up to the 1960s, the “social democratic societies” from the 1940s

to the 1970s, the “communist and post-communist societies” from 1917

through the end of the century, and the “hypercapitalist societies” (or

“neo-proprietarian societies”) since the 1980s. These different societies

define the plan of the book. Its novelty centres around the employment

of ideology in the narrative and its policies to promote a “just society”

from the way in which different societies have experienced inequality.

This review focuses on each of these two elements.