A bestselling economist sets out the case for socialism

Capital and Ideology. By Thomas Piketty. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Belknap Press; 1,104 pages; $39.95 and £31.95.

THOMAS PIKETTY’S “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, first published in 2013, made the French economist a household name. Combining heavy economic theory with data wizardry and commentary on the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac, Mr Piketty argued that capitalism almost inevitably generates high and rising inequality. Many of his claims—that the stock of wealth in an economy grows faster than income, for instance, or that inequality in the West is approaching levels last seen during the Belle Époque—are now both familiar and fiercely debated.

Mr Piketty’s new book is over 1,000 pages long and looks far beyond the West. Austen and Balzac turn up again—joined by “Black Panther”, a recent blockbuster film, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel “Americanah”. Mr Piketty says the tome is “in large part a sequel” to its predecessor, yet in an important way it is a clear change of direction. In “Capital” Mr Piketty shared Karl Marx’s goal in the work of the same name that he published in 1867: to reveal the economic logic of the capitalist mode of production. “Capital and Ideology”, by contrast, is closer to the sociological writings of Marx and...