Mr. Piketty's big book of Marxiness
If politics is a war by other means, then books often serve as the artillery. Take Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life, the foundational text of modern American liberalism. Its publication in 1909 was heralded as a revelation, when in fact it was more a synthesis of notions that had been floating around in the political ether for a decade. Theodore Roosevelt loved it. “I do not know when I have read a book which I felt profited me as much,” T.R. wrote to Croly. “I shall use your ideas freely in speeches I intend to make. I know you won’t object to my doing so, because, my dear sir, I can see that your purpose is to do your share in any way for the betterment of our national life.” But what Roosevelt loved most was that Croly was saying exactly what T.R. wanted to hear.
Christopher Lasch noted that “Croly did not so much influence Roosevelt as read into his career an intellectual coherence which Roosevelt then adopted as his own view of things.” Others found Croly similarly useful. Walter Lippmann dubbed him the “first important political philosopher” of the 20th century. Felix Frankfurter hailed The Promise of American Life as the “most powerful single contribution to progressive thinking.” Like Ferris Bueller, leaping in front of the parade and pretending he was leading it, Croly got out in front of an idea whose time had come.
This happens every decade or so. Writers as varied as the economic historians Charles and Mary Beard, the public intellectual Walter Lippmann, the economists Friedrich Hayek and John Kenneth Galbraith, the sociologist David Riesman, the legal scholar Charles A. Reich, the biologist Paul Ehrlich, the philosopher Allan Bloom, the historian of international relations Paul Kennedy, and political scientist Francis Fukuyama all captured sociological lightning in a bottle by publishing bestselling books that imposed some coherence on the national anxieties and ambitions of their moment in time.
Revisiting many of these works can lead to bewilderment. What on earth could all the fuss have been about? Reich’s The Greening of America is a miserable mess, replete with hippy-dippy nonsense and messianic gobbledygook that might have made some sense in 1970 but seems hilariously dated now. Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd divided people into psycho-sociological categories—inner-directed, tradition-directed, other-directed—that almost seem parodic today. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) holds up much better, but unlike his other works, its significance is more sociological than analytical. Similarly, the analysis in Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958) is more valuable as an insight into the hubris of what would become Great Society liberalism than as a serious empirical guide to political economy. As for The Promise of American Life itself, it is a strange and tedious read, though fortunately for Croly’s reputation, few people actually read it anymore.
It remains to be seen what history will make of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which was released in America in April. But it was so perfectly timed that it joined the ranks of those lightning-in-a-bottle books even before its publication. Piketty purports to offer a “general theory of capitalism,” in the words of the economist Tyler Cowen. His theory is that capitalism inherently leads to ever-widening income inequality that can be addressed only through heavy taxes on accumulated wealth. In December 2013, President Obama prepared the intellectual battlefield for Piketty by declaring that income inequality was now “the defining challenge of our time.” As the enormous and dense tome finally settled in at the top of the charts, Hillary Clinton previewed a presidential campaign stump speech of sorts, which largely focused on Piketty’s core theme: inequality. Even the pope got in on the act. Adding a religious dimension to Piketty’s theories on Twitter, he declared in late April that “inequality is the root of social evil” and called for “the legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the State.”
In short, Capital in the Twenty-First Century provides some coherence to an idea whose time has come. And for those who already agreed with its thesis from reading the introduction, it has become not so much The Promise of American Life but the Democracy in America of our time. Indeed, no doubt because Piketty is French, the comparisons to Alexis de Tocqueville have been ubiquitous. In the words of Yale’s Jacob Hacker and Berkeley’s Paul Piereson: “Like Tocqueville, Piketty has given us a new image of ourselves.” They add: “This time, it’s one we should resist, not welcome.”
According to Boris Kachka of New York magazine, “One hundred and eighty years after Alexis de Tocqueville came back to France with the news that he’d found true égalité in America, his countryman has arrived on our shores to deliver the opposite news.”
Taken literally, the comparison between the two writers is ridiculous.
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