Part of the challenge of addressing political economy is the different realms that economic and philosophical discourse exist in. Western (capitalist) economics can be informed by history but it can’t accommodate it. This can be seen in response to French economist Thomas Piketty’s new book ‘Capital in the Twenty First Century.’ The effort, nay contrived ‘necessity,’ of quantifying income distribution across history, as Piketty has done, places it at the center of what could in different terms leave it as bit player, as artifact rather than base discursive fact. This isn’t to argue that income distribution isn’t ‘important.’ It is to argue that there are other, possibly more illuminating,...
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