When Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st-Century became a bestseller following its publication in 2013, the commentariat expressed surprise that ponderous economic analysis had become the object of popular enthusiasm. But the phenomenon was not exactly unprecedented. In 2000 an obscure and barely readable academic treatise called Empire, by Marxist philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, flew off the shelves. In 1872, Marx’s Das Capital became a hit in Russia when the censor neglected to ban it on the grounds that surely no one would read such an abstruse book. Upon its debut in the US in 1879, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty quickly became a bestseller too.
What all of these books have in common is their sense that there is something very wrong with the stories we tell ourselves – stories largely derived from economics – about why such things as progress and poverty should continue to exist side by side. Not the least of the difficulties, as George in particular makes clear in the early chapters of his book, is that we live in a post-Babel world, where we don’t talk the same language even when we’re using the same words.
