Every human society has the need to justify its economic, social, and political inequalities. It must find the causes of these inequalities; otherwise, the political and social structure risks collapsing. These justifications contain some truth but also exaggeration, imagination, pettiness, idealism, and egoism.

Through political discourse and the contradictory ideologies produced, one or more dominant narratives often emerge that underpin the regimes of inequality. The subject of this monumental book is the history and future of regimes of inequality. By gathering historical material from societies that are geographically and temporally distant from one another, the great thinker and social scientist Thomas Piketty aims to contribute to a better understanding of the ongoing transformations and, above all, to demonstrate how fragile the dominant narrative of the last two centuries has been in legitimizing inequalities.

According to this narrative, contemporary inequalities are just, as they manifest within a freely chosen process where everyone has equal opportunities for access to the market and property, thus automatically benefitting from the accumulations of the wealthiest, who are the most active from a business standpoint, the most deserving and useful. This narrative has today led to contradictions, the forms of which vary significantly between Europe and the United States, India and Brazil, China and South Africa, Venezuela, and the Middle East.

The different paths that arise from local histories and that partly intersect are now, in the early 21st century, ever more closely interconnected. Only through a supranational approach, such as that adopted by Piketty, can we overturn the dominant narrative and construct a new, alternative narrative for future societies.

“A colossal scientific work on the history of inequalities.” Financial Times

“A dazzling experiment in social science.” The Guardian

“Piketty's erudition is truly unique!” Literary Review

“Let us read this book from beginning to end. Piketty proves to us that it is in our hands to write our own history.” Esther Duflo (Nobel Prize in Economics)