Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Journal of Corporate Law Studies on 04/08/2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.5235/14735970.15.1.183
Accepted author manuscript, 254 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - The fetishism of divergence
T2 - a critique of Piketty
AU - Campbell, David
N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Journal of Corporate Law Studies on 04/08/2015, available online:http://www.tandfonline.com/10.5235/14735970.15.1.183
PY - 2015/9/1
Y1 - 2015/9/1
N2 - “the strength and weakness of that kind of criticism which knows how to judge and condemn the present, but not how to comprehend it”Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty First Century has enjoyed a reception comparable only to that of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom or Galbraith's The Affluent Society. It restates Piketty and colleagues’ statistical history of capitalist inequality and advances an explanation of this based on the operation of pernicious economic forces of capitalism. The book obviously invites comparison with Marx's Capital. However, Piketty's “capital” is entirely divorced from any concrete conception of capitalist production, and his critique of capitalism is merely moralistic in a way which Marx would have scorned. Piketty's explanation of the growth of inequality since 1980, particularly of the growth of managerial “supersalaries”, displays a failure to grasp the character of the economic and legal institutions of corporate capitalism.
AB - “the strength and weakness of that kind of criticism which knows how to judge and condemn the present, but not how to comprehend it”Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty First Century has enjoyed a reception comparable only to that of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom or Galbraith's The Affluent Society. It restates Piketty and colleagues’ statistical history of capitalist inequality and advances an explanation of this based on the operation of pernicious economic forces of capitalism. The book obviously invites comparison with Marx's Capital. However, Piketty's “capital” is entirely divorced from any concrete conception of capitalist production, and his critique of capitalism is merely moralistic in a way which Marx would have scorned. Piketty's explanation of the growth of inequality since 1980, particularly of the growth of managerial “supersalaries”, displays a failure to grasp the character of the economic and legal institutions of corporate capitalism.
U2 - 10.5235/14735970.15.1.183
DO - 10.5235/14735970.15.1.183
M3 - Journal article
VL - 15
SP - 183
EP - 216
JO - Journal of Corporate Law Studies
JF - Journal of Corporate Law Studies
SN - 1473-5970
IS - 1
ER -