The British Journal of Sociology 2014 Volume 65 Issue 4

Piketty’s challenge for sociology

Mike Savage

Abstract
This paper argues that Piketty’s book should not simply be seen as that of an
economist, but that it contains significant resources for sociologists to draw upon.
These are firstly, this approach to social science and his use of visualizations which
chime closely with recent claims about the power of description. Secondly I con-
sider his conceptualization of time and history – which in rebutting epochal argu-
ments about the speed of contemporary change allows for a much better
appreciation of the ‘long durée’; and finally his conceptualization of social classes
and privilege through his elaboration of a sociology of accumulation and
inheritance. In all these ways, Piketty’s work assists in developing an account of
elites and wealth which should be highly productive for future sociology.
Keywords: Piketty; capital; accumulation; history; elites; class

In the short time since Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) was pub-
lished in English, it is clear that Thomas Piketty has seized the opportunity for
contemporary social science to satisfy the thirst for wide ranging social analysis
which has not been slaked in recent decades. Rather than play to specialist
academic communities, mired in their own paradigms and technical toolkits,
Piketty has been bold enough to play to a bigger audience. He does this not
through the kind of grandiose theorizing that sociologists are familiar with, but
instead through the careful empirical unravelling of the long-term patterns of
demographic and economic change across numerous nations over the past two
hundred years. In this paper I argue that his work should not be seen simply as
a specialist study in economics – though it is surely this – but is also of
profound significance for sociology.
It needs no emphasis that the book had an astonishing take up in the
Anglophone world. It captures a certain zeitgeist associated with the growing
public recognition that the rise of the very wealthy is one of the defining issues
of our time. Its unusual willingness to offer policy recommendations – notably

Savage (Department of Sociology, London School of Economcis and Political Science) (Corresponding author email: m.a.savage@
lse.ac.uk)
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2014 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12106
592 Mike Savage

in his call for a wealth tax – alongside its academic pronouncements is a

welcome tonic to the kind of anaemic social science which predominates today.
But there is a danger that this remarkable reception will lead to the wider
lessons not being learned given that a backlash is bound to follow (and indeed
has already come).
The debate on Piketty has settled into political disputes about the value of his
proposed wealth tax, and reflections on the quality of his data sources, his (lack
of?) economic theory and so on. These foci are not surprising given the nature
of his book. However, my claim here will be that he also offers an unusual – and
I will argue highly insightful, even though not uncontentious – angle to explore
fundamental questions of historical change, social class and inequality, and
indeed the nature of the sociology and the social sciences themselves.
I therefore want to approach Piketty sociologically in order to bring out
three features of his work which I think offer challenges, and also resources to
the discipline. These are firstly, his approach to social science and his use of
descriptive methods; secondly his conceptualization of time, history and social
change – which seems massively at odds with sociological orthodoxy; and
finally his conceptualization of social classes and privilege through his elabo-
ration of a sociology of accumulation and inheritance. In all three of these
areas, I will suggest, Piketty unsettles sociological perspectives in ways which
are profoundly important and in my view offer resources for better kinds of
sociology. This is not to say that there are no problems with his approach,
which indeed I will seek to bring out, but it is to argue that he poses a set of
fascinating opportunities for reflection.

1. Social science methodologies

It is the fact that Piketty writes as an economist that is fundamental to his

appeal. A book of this kind – though not this actual book – might have been
written by a social policy researcher, a political scientist, and perhaps even by
a sociologist. Indeed, many of his central ideas, that there is a key difference
between income and wealth, that the latter is more unevenly distributed than
the former, and that the accumulation of wealth lies at the heart of social
inequality is standard fare, even mundane in these disciplines. However, a
book of such a kind not written by an economist would not have commanded
such authority.
But fundamentally it is the fact that he speaks from the highground of
economics which allows him an unusually prominent platform. But let us tease
out the kind of economist that Piketty is. He himself makes it clear that he
distances himself from mathematical versions of the discipline towards more
interdisciplinary framings. ‘I see economics as a subdiscipline of the social
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 Piketty’s challenge for sociology 593

sciences, alongside history, sociology, anthropology, and political science’ he

proudly declares (Piketty 2014: 573). However, we can also suggest that his
relationship to economics itself is more agonistic than even this statement
suggests.
At the heart of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the formula r>g. This
simple equation summarizes the book’s argument that ‘the central contradic-
tion of capitalism’ is that the return on capital is usually higher than the
economic growth rate and therefore that we can expect an historical default
towards returns on accumulated wealth exceeding those on current income.
This is a very simple idea, and it is one which is of great sociological interest in
gesturing towards a sociology of inheritance, or perhaps a sociology of
‘haunting’. The past will always exceed the present. I will return to this shortly.
But for now, let us note that this is a strange equation. Piketty gives no obvious
theoretical reasons for it, and in this respect Marxist critics (e.g. Kunkel 2014)
are quite right to point out that there is no analytical foundation, such as a
theory of value, underlying his magnum opus. Really, the equation can only be
understood as an empirical generalization inductively derived from the mass
of data gathered here. But this is precisely the point. Is Piketty actually
ironizing economist’s favoured tools in order to reassert his fundamental point
about the significance of history?
Methodologically, Piketty is conducting a fundamental critique of the rep-
ertoires used in much of what currently passes as social science. This is
nowhere marked more strikingly than the way he invokes literary figures
ranging from Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, and Orhan Pamuk more than
Simon Kuznets, Karl Marx or John Maynard Keynes to explore the nature of
wealth accumulation and inheritance in the nineteenth century. From an
economist, this is brilliant chutzpah. Nor is he simply using these novelists to
illustrate his history, but he is invoking them in a much more radical way to
unravel the strategic structure of accumulation strategies in wealthy house-
holds in past times.
In a second way, Piketty also challenges the core methodological doxa of the
social sciences by relying not on interviews, surveys and ethnography but by
showing the power of documentary sources. Economists have always been
more adept at using such sources than the other social sciences, though as
Krugman (2014) notes, even amongst economists, survey data predominates.
Piketty profoundly shows the value of using tax data and national accounts
and hence in showing how an extended methodological repertoire can reveal
issues which survey data cannot, especially long term change and the signifi-
cance of outliers. I return to these points presently.
Thirdly, at its heart, Piketty’s book is fundamentally descriptive. Rather than
the typical social scientific insistence on causality as the holy grail, the book’s
ample figures and graphs present only uni- and bi-variate distributions. There
are no complex causal multi-variate models, no ‘variable centred’ attempts to
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594 Mike Savage

distil the relative significance of various bundles of independent variables and

the like. There is no league table of causal variables explaining wealth accu-
mulation which pop out at the end of the book. Instead, Piketty relies on
descriptive figures showing trends over time with no attempt to explain the
trends through introducing independent causal variables.
This strategy is interesting given the current methodological debate regard-
ing the relative merits of ‘descriptive’ versus ‘causal’ strategies in the social
sciences (see for instance Abbott 2000; Savage 2009). Piketty is far from alone
in championing description (Savage 2009 also explores the use of descriptive
approaches by Andrew Abbott, John Goldthorpe and Bruno Latour and of
course this could be extended to include Clifford Geertz and others). None the
less, it will surely be the case that his book is now the best example of what one
might be able to achieve using description and the fact this appears so pow-
erful is indeed telling.
What are the merits of this descriptive strategy? Firstly, we need to get away
from the view that this is an empiricist approach, or that Piketty’s strength lies
in assembling ‘facts’ (for which argument see http://manchestercapitalism.
blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/piketty-or-just-facts.html). Just like all good social sci-
entists, Piketty is well aware that facts do not speak for themselves. What is
distinctive to Piketty’s work is his repertoire of assembling his data to a
particular visual template. Bruno Latour drew attention to the way that
natural scientists are happy once they have visualizations of their findings, and
so it is here. Piketty, in Latour’s terms mobilizes a powerful set of visual
inscription devices and uses these to great effect. His trademark is the way that
he uses estimates of national income as a benchmark against which estimates
of types of capital and wealth are measured.1 Piketty rarely uses any absolute
measures, the main exception being his careful and important account of
population growth in chapter 2. He characteristically sets out one variable of
interest with respect to its relationship to a national benchmark.
This reliance on relativizing his key data against measures of national
income matters in several ways. To be sure, there is the minor point that this
may encourage additional error, as he is benchmarking one set of estimates
against another, rather than reporting either of the estimates in absolute terms.
More than this, he essentially removes the absolute growth of the world
economy from his account. He is controlling for history, a sceptic might
suggest. This matters because the absolute, rather than relative, patterns might
be important as they can be associated with sociological factors such as an
expanded division of labour, a complex state infrastructure, welfare provision,
and so forth. Thus, in his now famous arguments that forms of inequality are
returning to those of the late nineteenth century Belle Époque, we are not
reminded that absolute levels of prosperity are now much higher, with the
implication that this might give greater capacities to the billionaires of today to
further accumulate their fortunes (e.g. through cost efficient ways of investing
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 Piketty’s challenge for sociology 595

their money2) compared to the magnates of yesteryear. We might also note the
way that his reliance on national measures also smuggles in a certain kind of
methodological nationalism, and that even though he extends his range of
national case studies relatively widely, and is also attentive to the significance
of international flows of capital, this none the less tends to reproduce a stand-
ard spatially bounded approach to his analysis.3 And finally, we might also note
how this kind of analysis is typical of the economists’ move to strip out context
from history through the use of abstracted cross temporal and cross cultural
measures, to render historical change as somehow outside history, as it were
(see the general arguments of Mitchell 2002).
These are serious issues to which I will return, but I want to insist that there
is a problem if these kinds of general criticisms hide the specific advantages
which his framing can produce. These are several. Firstly, it allows him to
descriptively unpack the importance of ‘outliers’. Such outliers are notably
revealed by Piketty’s figures which indicate how far the top few percentile of
the wealth distribution tends to be distinctive compared to the rest of the
distribution.4 It is for this reason that he criticizes the gini coefficient as the
best measure to examine wealth. Whilst in principle there is no reason why
multivariate causal models should not also reveal top end outliers, in practice
Piketty’s inscription devices do a readily accessible job. Given his argument
about the distinctiveness of the distribution at the very top wealth, his visuali-
zations are highly fit for purpose
Secondly, Piketty’s benchmarking of different kinds of capital against
national income is of profound theoretical as well as substantive interest in
allowing a way of empirically assessing the ‘inheritance’ effect. The relation-
ship between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, between the ‘fixed’ and the ‘mobile’, or
between ‘de-‘ and ‘re-territorialization’ has been amply and repetitively
explored in social theory over many decades in the work of Giddens,
Bourdieu, Deleuze, Delanda and numerous others. However, it has proven
very difficult to empirically make much of these distinctions in concrete
research, however analytically valuable they might be. Yet, Piketty gives us one
– imperfect, but valuable – way of operationalizing some kind of distinction
which allows us to grasp ‘the power of the past’. If we take his measures of
capital as in a sense the fixed ‘stock’ of value from the past, and income as
current ‘flow’ (see Piketty 2014: 50), we hence get some kind of assessment of
the relationship between the past, historical forces as opposed to the role of
current forces over different periods. Of course, this is at best a loose analogy.
The realization of past stocks of stored historical capital relies upon contem-
porary conditions, whilst current income is of course actually measured
annually rather than simultaneously.
None the less, glossing over this, Piketty’s argument that there is generally a
ratio of six times capital to one times national income is a nice way of
operationalizing some kind of way of assessing the relationship of the past
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596 Mike Savage

over the present. Six times structure to one times agency would be a lovely,
albeit tongue in cheek, way of resolving this long term sociological dispute.
And the fact that this ratio falls in the middle decades of the twentieth century
when the wartime destruction of infrastructure, as well as the shock of war
itself visibly shatters the hold of the past is also suggestive about how historical
factors can shape this relationship in different contexts. I return to this point
below.
Piketty’s insistence on demography is also important. Much economics, and
indeed much sociological research on stratification and inequality seeks to
abstract from age, family and kinship dynamics in order to discern the ‘pure’
effect of variables such class, status and so forth as if these can be delineated
separately from the other ‘contaminating’ forces. Demography is then shunted
off into a separate (and often not very glamorous) siding where it does not
cross fertilize systematically with debates about inequality. Piketty demon-
strates by contrast that demographic dynamics have fundamental significance
in shaping patterns of inequality. This comes out both in his analysis of the
demographic transition, and also in his contrast between Europe and America,
the latter where population growth is more marked (from a much less dense
base) and leads to the ratio of wealth to savings being markedly less than in
Europe. Piketty’s focus on inheritance and the significance of transfers within
families is further evidence of his re-orientation of social scientific analysis
towards demographic, kinship, and household analyses. Whilst highly ‘macro’
in its orientation, none the less Piketty recognizes the significance of the
‘micro’ strategies of individuals, families, and households. Here, he is pushing
at a gate which is also being opened in studies of social mobility which increas-
ingly emphasize the way that wider kinship dynamics cannot be abstracted
from the analysis of mobility itself (Mare 2011).
My opening contention therefore is that Piketty’s book is interesting not
only as an argument about capital and wealth, but also as a model of descrip-
tive social science that might be able to explore the relationship between past
and present within an elaborated perspective on what he terms ‘serial history’.
In this way, perhaps Piketty might best be seen as the contemporary repre-
sentative of French Annales School history with his classical Braudelian insist-
ence on the ‘long durée’. His work can be read as is therefore a fundamental
insistence on the need for an historical social science and a powerful demoli-
tion of the kind of ‘presentist’ sociology that abounds. Let me pursue this
theme through reflecting on Piketty’s arguments about social change

2. Time, history and social change

The social sciences, and especially sociology, abound with epochalist thinking
(see generally Savage 2009). We are seen to have moved, variously, to a
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2014 British Journal of Sociology 65(4)
 Piketty’s challenge for sociology 597

globalized, post-modern, neo-liberal, informationalized, cosmopolitan, (and so

forth) world order. Such thinking saturates debates about social change and
incites an almost constant agitation for detecting new kinds of epochal change
and transformation which makes our contemporary times different from any-
thing that comes before.
In these suffocating conditions, Piketty offers not so much a breath of fresh
air but rather a vital infusion of oxygen. His work is a powerful and extended
critique of the conceit that our present time has somehow left history behind.
Actually, is Jane Austen’s world so different from ours?5 Have we really left
behind the elitism and pervasive inequality characteristic of aristocratic
society and the Belle Époque? Don’t the strategies for wealth accumulation
developed by Bill Gates and other billionaires share some common character-
istics with the very wealthy of previous centuries? Page after page of Piketty
refutes the glib temptations of ‘presentism’ and insists on the need for careful
historical study.
The kind of historical interpretation that Piketty articulates is worth setting
in contrast to the sociological orthodoxies of social change, for the differences
are very arresting. Sociologists of all hues classically identify the onset of
modernity, associated with the Industrial Revolution, as a fundamental
transition. To be sure, Piketty shows that that the period between 1700 and
1802 did see an acceleration of growth rates. However, they did not reach their
peak till well into the twentieth century and were only modest at the outset
(Piketty 2014: Fig 2.5). Where the Industrial Revolution did make a difference
was in permitting Europe to challenge the centuries old domination of Asia
within the world economy, and here Piketty’s account is germane to the post-
colonial critique of theories of modernity in pointing to its distinctive Euro-
pean genesis. Here, his further exploration of the recent revival of Asia as the
most important region of the world economy is also revealing in pointing
firmly to the end of this age of Eurocentric modernity.
Sociologists have not developed a theoretical account of social change in
the middle years of the twentieth century, which are normally seen as the
extension of ‘industrial capitalism’. Piketty however emphasizes the histori-
cal distinctiveness of these decades. These are the ‘blip’ years which defy
economic expectations. There are the most striking rates of growth and
remarkable economic dynamism. These are also the years of communist
revolution,6 fascism, world war and anti-colonial struggles, which makes
the neglect of them by sociologists all the more remarkable. Piketty’s chal-
lenge to sociology is therefore to recognize the significance of war, revolu-
tion, and political mobilization as having profoundly social aspects and
implications.
In recent decades, those that sociologists have normally characterized as
marked by deep and profound epochal change, Piketty argues that we are in
fact reverting to much older patterns. History, it seems, is reasserting itself. It is
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598 Mike Savage

noteworthy that some sociological research has indeed pointed to the distinc-
tive and unusual features of British society during the middle decades of the
twentieth century, notably with the dominance of the formal over the informal
economy, the shortlived dominance of the male breadwinner household and so
forth (see Pahl 1984). Piketty provides the most robust argument yet that we
are now seeing the reassertion of older structures. Substantiated at great
length, he claims that there is in fact a striking persistence in the dynamics of
capitalist accumulation and that we are now returning towards the Belle
Époque of the early twentieth century after a brief blip in the middle decades
of the twentieth century linked to the two World Wars and inflation. Whatever
social theorists might claim about ‘new spirits of capitalism’ (Boltanski and
Chiapello 2008), the epochalist remaking of network society (Castells 1996/97)
and so forth, there is actually a remarkable and enduring regularity which
needs to be placed at the forefront of our understanding of contemporary – as
much as classical – capitalism. Nothing much has changed, and in fact we are
becoming rather more like our Victorian forbears than was the case fifty
years ago.
As part of this scepticism towards epochalism, we might also take heed of
Piketty’s valuable side reflections about the significance of globalization,
which has become a mantra throughout the social sciences. However, in so far
as it is measured by the amount of capital invested abroad from within differ-
ent nations, Piketty’s evidence appears to be that globalization is of remark-
ably little significance. His Figure 5.7 suggests that net foreign assets are of
little significance for eight leading nations7 and that in general their signifi-
cance is declining vis à vis other sources of capital. To be sure, this is only one
measure of what globalization might consist of, but it is still helpful to recog-
nize the multiplexity of current trends as a means of refusing to place them
into an over-arching grand narrative.
Let me further dissect this argument about his anti-epochalist leanings, as its
implications are profound. We are surrounded by arguments that we live in a
society of ‘acceleration’ (Rosa 2013), and of intensifying mobility and speed
(see Urry 2007 and many others within the ‘mobility paradigm’). In fact, the
picture Piketty paints is the complete opposite, because he is able, through
benchmarking wealth against income, to contrast current with inherited
capital. Therefore, Piketty suggests, there was less inheritance (as a higher
proportion of the national income) during the middle years of the twentieth
century. The ratio of capital (i.e. historic, accumulated value) against current
income is switching towards the former, so that the balance of historical forces
over contemporary ones is increasing. This is notably true with respect to the
growing importance of inheritance, where literally children are handed down
the residues of resources accumulated by their forbears. In the French case,
Piketty argues that inherited wealth was 80–90 per cent of total wealth in the
nineteenth century which fell to slightly less than half by 1970, but is now
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 Piketty’s challenge for sociology 599

climbing, has reached nearly 70 per cent and is expected to reach 80 per cent
by 2050. Similar patterns obtain elsewhere.
In similar vein, Piketty notes how wealth accumulates dramatically even
once entrepreneurs cease direct activity. Thus, Bill Gates’ wealth has increased
far more since he ceased being CEO of Microsoft. Rather than economic
capital being the reward for active engagement in the world of business and
finance, it is actually the significance of rentier income which is striking. Accu-
mulation takes a form which is highly familiar to the Victorian landed class,
where a steady return on capital could be expected.
These findings are not only arresting in so far as they dispute the grand
sociological narratives, but also in questioning the sociological conception of
change itself. Somehow, there is a conflation between speed, mobility and
change in much contemporary sociological theory which Piketty debunks
highly effectively here. In his view, slowness produces change.8
And, slowness is not necessarily morally superior to ‘speed up’. The domi-
nant motifs – evident notably in movements such as that of ‘slow food’ –
around acceleration is that this has problematic consequences (e.g. being
harried, stressed), and that being ‘slow’ is preferable (see Wajcman 2014;
Nichols forthcoming). Piketty suggests a rather different interpretation, that
slowness involves the declining significance of merit based income and the
growing power of inheritance. Therefore, slowness is associated with a greater
inheritance from the past and is thus implicated in the inter-generational
reproduction of inequality.
Piketty’s work also debunks the neo-liberal mantra that the economic role
of the state has changed profoundly. In fact, with remarkable regularity, the
ratio between private and public wealth is in the order of 6:1.This changes very
little, if at all, despite changes in the politics associated with state intervention,
the shift to marketization, neo-liberalism and so forth.9 This point is so impor-
tant because of the obsession of the social sciences towards studying the state.
Of course there are good reasons for this, reflecting the strategic importance of
the state for many decisive outcomes, especially militaristic and geo-strategic
ones. None the less, and by contrast the private world of wealth accumulation,
both at the macro scale in large corporations but also in the smaller scales of
household and petty business is also massively significant.
Finally, Piketty’s analysis allows us to recognize the power of small scale,
household based accumulation. For, notwithstanding the significance of large
corporate forms, in most nations it is household savings which outstrip corpo-
rate savings.10 Similarly, it is wealth tied up in housing which now comprises a
very large part of the capital stocks of modern nations.
Now, having said all this, we need to recognize that Piketty’s practice of
controlling for population density and national income has the effect of flat-
tening the historical record in the way we discussed above, but it is still useful
to work within his parameters. This is because he is, in fact, able to detect some
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600 Mike Savage

striking social changes, as well as continuities, though these are not the kind
that dominate in sociological epochalism. What kind of social change does he
reveal? The most fundamental shift is that from capital tied up in agricultural
land to that tied in housing. By the early 2000s, housing was the single largest
source of capital in all nations except the USA. This is the clearest possible
evidence of the profound shift from rural to urban society that we have, and is
a remarkable response to those who claim that urbanism ‘as a way of life’ has
somehow become less significant in a globalized world. In fact, urban stakes
now appear more important than ever before.

3. Piketty and class analysis

Let me turn now to consider the implications of Piketty’s arguments for class
analysis. There is an interesting growth of dialogue between sociology and
economics in exploring social mobility and social stratification in recent years
(e.g. Blanden, Gregg and Macmillan 2013), and Piketty pushes this dialogue
much further than his predecessors. However, the logic of his arguments is also
rather disruptive of sociological orthodoxy in an interesting and provocative
way.
Piketty (2014: 250f) directly invokes the language of class in distinguishing
between upper, middle and lower classes in terms of their income distribution
(on a 10: 40: 50 ratio). Piketty admits this is a largely ad hoc and arbitrary
classification which largely follows the economists’ general approach,
which has been, and continues to be, criticized by sociologists who prefer
occupational and employment based approaches to class (see Erikson and
Goldthorpe 2010, for instance).
It would, however, be wrong to think that Piketty’s use of income based
definitions of class is the central feature of his approach and it does not, in
fact, figure very extensively. In fact, there are several other more pertinent
issues at the heart of his analysis. Most importantly of all, Piketty focuses on
accumulation rather than exploitation as the central dynamic of capitalism.11
This move is controversial in some quarters, but it has been argued elsewhere
(most directly in Savage, Warde and Devine 2005), that this framing has great
strategic advantages in moving debates about inequality away from abstrac-
tions towards the kind of empirically nuanced perspectives. Rather than fix-
ating on dividing lines between exploiters and exploited, dominators and
dominated, and so forth, and which defaults to a problematic politics of ‘class
antagonism’ that cannot do other than reproduce the very same kind of
divisions which it seeks to dispel, a focus on accumulation recognizes that
class relationships are not zero sum games, that all agents, differentially posi-
tioned within society, develop sensible (in their own terms) strategies to
secure and advance their position. However, the overall result of such
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 Piketty’s challenge for sociology 601

accumulatory politics can nevertheless be to generate structural inequalities.

Without class conscious agents or overt antagonisms, powerful inequalities
can be generated. Piketty’s is the most elaborated and thought through expli-
cation of what an approach based on accumulation might deliver to class
analysis. It allows us to see how fundamental inequalities can be generated by
agents who are completely oblivious to class and who are not necessarily
collectively organized.
One way of reflecting on Piketty’s importance here is to see him as offering
an account of economic capital which is a crucial counterpart to Bourdieu’s
dissection of cultural capital (see Bourdieu 1985 and the more recent reflec-
tions of Bennett et al. 2009). Although Piketty makes only scant reference to
Bourdieu’s work, there is a clear counterpart in their thinking through their
common focus around accumulation and inheritance (see Piketty 2014: 486).
At the most general level, Piketty’s arguments are consistent with a power-
ful move which is evident in contemporary social theory which fuses philo-
sophical pragmatism with Bourdieu’s field analysis. Most clearly articulated by
John Levi Martin (2011), in his The Explanation of Social Action, this refuses
the conventional social science temptation to read behind what actors actually
think so that only social scientists really know the interests of social
protagonists. The history of class analysis is littered with appeals to ‘depth
models’, where social agents are seen to be the product of underlying forces,
notably in claims about false consciousness which ultimately lead to groups
claiming to act on behalf of the less enlightened, with all the problematic
totalitarian politics that this can lead to. Martin instead insists on the way that
if social life is seen as based in fields of ‘organized striving’, it is always those
agents who know best about the nature of these fields and how they can
operate within them. Thus, the routine talk about house prices, legal testimo-
nies about inheritance, and watching stocks and shares is the very stuff which
drives the economic fields which generate inequality and which many people
are themselves highly aware of as they go about their activities. Therefore, it is
the mundane small (and big) scale strategies which people deploy for invest-
ment, inheritance and such like that is the stuff of class culture and practice.
This is an appeal for a kind of ‘flat’ descriptive social which provides a more
robust platform for class analysis
Next, sociological theorists of class – from both Marxist and Weberian
persuasions – have nearly entirely focused on the labour market as the arena
in which class divisions are forged, and therefore typically categorize class
according to employment position and occupation. Piketty starkly shows that
this approach misses the role of wealth and inheritance in the definition of
class, notably at its upper reaches. Here, Piketty’s perspective is one which
Marxists should find congenial (even though the Marxist reception has not
been very sympathetic). Rewards to income – i.e. those which are convention-
ally seen as the arena of class contestation – are now falling in Britain and
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602 Mike Savage

France (2014: Figures 6.1 and 6.2) and income from capital is now a quarter of
total national income. Interestingly, in both nations, class conflict over incomes,
notably through trade union mobilization, appears to be at its peak when the
proportion of labour income in the national income reaches its highest levels
(in the decades after the Second World War). The decline of overt class conflict
in the workplace might thus be seen in part as linked to the growing role of
income from capital.
Piketty also insists that income differentials are invariably more moderate
than are those from wealth. The scale of this difference between income and
wealth is profound and getting larger, even whilst recognizing that is getting
more marked and intense amongst income earners too. Therefore, the fact that
analysis of class rarely, if ever, registers the significance of wealth inequalities
directly is surely an indication of a serious limitation of its reach.
An important implication of this argument is that rather than seeing class as
solely based on the labour market, and hence as associated with a public
sphere (which is often associated with male adults), in fact classes are also
bound up with households and family life. By re-introducing household wealth
into the study of class, it becomes possible to link family dynamics to class in
a way which might recognize the significance of non-employed household
members and provide a richer and more wide ranging perspective on class12.
What, then, is the implication of Piketty’s analysis for identifying the key
class divisions of contemporary nations? Firstly, and most obviously, he iden-
tifies a very small, very wealthy class of households which are becoming
markedly more wealthy at a great pace. Yet, because this small very wealthy
class is so internally divided between its excruciatingly wealthy top 0.1 per cent
(or even more, it top 0.01 per cent), this is a class which is unlikely to be
coherent amongst itself, and indeed probably experiences more internal divi-
sion than any other class. Bill Gates is unlikely to think he has much in
common with a mere billionaire, let alone a relatively impoverished multi-
millionaire. Just like the Duke of Westminster would have seen himself in a
very different situation to a member of the lesser aristocracy, we need to see
this internal demarcation and differentiation of the very privileged. To this
extent, the Occupy movement which sought to define a top 1 per cent have
found a rather insecure target.
Secondly, Piketty draws attention a larger ‘elite’ class who have benefitted
extensively from property ownership and inheritance, and are a significant
group of a few per cent, perhaps up to 10 per cent as in his reckoning. This is
the proportion who can expect to receive in inheritance of an amount equiva-
lent to the lifetime labour income of the bottom 50 per cent of the labour force
(2014: Figure 11.11) and is hence highly privileged to the extent that they can
expect a major windfall during their lives which will insulate them from any
serious economic concerns. The fact that such a high proportion of people can
expect an inheritance of this amount is striking demonstration of the need to
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2014 British Journal of Sociology 65(4)
 Piketty’s challenge for sociology 603

make careful differentiation within the ranks of the very wealthy, and to
recognize that whilst the super wealthy are distinctive, there is also a much
larger (though still very small) class who are extremely privileged. This larger
elite class might coincide in some ways with Savage et al’s (2013) elaboration
of an elite class (which they see as about 7 per cent of the population) which
is set apart economically from all the other classes they detect.
Within the remaining 90 per cent of the population, it is difficult to draw
hard and sharp economic boundaries, since compared to those above them,
people’s economic capital shades into each other. In fact, Piketty says little
about differentiation within the ranks of the larger 90 per cent and this is
perhaps one of the reasons why his book has been so popular as it largely – and
in many respects, entirely reasonably – identifies the very wealthy as the big
winner that it has little to say about the stakes and tensions between those at
lower levels of the wealth distribution. Here, since there is still a very marked
difference amongst these groups, sociological class analysis has much more to
contribute and Piketty’s focus on the top of the distribution is less helpful.
Piketty’s republican tract could unite the vast majority of the population
around populist themes. Whether this adequately deals with the extent of
structural division within this larger group – amongst gender, ethnic, age
occupational and other axes is a point for discussion and elaboration.
The fundamental point which Piketty’s class analysis leads to, therefore, is
the need to focus on the very wealthy, and how far this group might indeed be
crystallizing as a class. Rather than the traditional sociological obsession with
the boundaries between middle and working class, and so the dividing lines in
the middle reaches of society, we instead need to turn our gaze much higher
up the social distribution in order to focus on the very wealthy and a broader
elite class. And here his references to the world of Austen and Balzac are very
pertinent. Given that he argues that economically we are returning to a period
of wealth stability such as they wrote about, are we also likely to see the
resumption of the kind of status based, kinship and inheritance dominated, and
ritualistic society that they delineate? And if so, what kinds of rituals and
symbolic life is characteristic of the super wealthy and the broader elite? What
is the role of elite education, of residential and consumption patterns, of
friendship and social networks amongst these groups? This is arguably the
fundamental sociological question of our age, in exploring the kinds of closure
and social and cultural elitism which might now characterize the very highest
levels of the social structure. What kind of kinship alliances, elite rituals, and
institutional powers do we see around us in 2014?
We do have one vital clue here. Piketty’s recognition that capital is now
articulated through urban infrastructure rather than agricultural land is telling.
The elite circles of today will not be those of landed society, even their urban
and spa haunts which form Jane Austen’s stage. Are we instead seeing the true
crystallization of a new breed of social elites inhabiting very distinctive elite
British Journal of Sociology 65(4) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2014
604 Mike Savage

zones in elite global cities, finding ways to mark themselves off and defining
themselves as members of a super elite? This is the fundamental question for
contemporary sociology.

Conclusion

In this paper I have suggested that whatever one makes of Piketty’s eco-
nomics, and his political proposals, his book is also a remarkable intervention
for sociologists too. He proffers fundamental reflections on the changing
(and unchanging) contours of wealth, income and inequality, but, also great
insights for reflecting on social inequality change more generally. I can think
of few books that empirically minded sociologists could read to better
advantage and which offers antidotes to banal epochal theorizing. There is a
danger that the political reception of the book colours this contribution. And
indeed, the fact that he has been criticized both by orthodox right wing and
left wing positions is striking of a danger that his capacity to open up ques-
tions will get closed down. For those who smugly feel they already know the
answers to today’s economic predicament, Piketty’s work can only be a
diversion.
Here, my last point is that it is indeed welcome that scholarship evident in
this book is so central to its power. I have argued that his book is no glitzy
manifesto but fundamentally a remarkable work of historical scholarship
which inductively makes a case about the nature of economic relations within
a wider set of arguments about social change in which history and the power
of inheritance occupies central stage. Of course, his is far from being the final
word. His achievements are dependent on him having to make assumptions –
notably that of controlling for population growth and income levels – which
are bound to flatten his historical framing and which (necessarily, and perhaps
productively) limit what he can say. None the less, he has laid out a path for
others to follow. I believe this turns out to be a highly illuminating route for
sociologists to tread.
(Date Accepted: September 2014)

Notes

1. Piketty predominantly uses figures different nations), 6 (the capital-labour

benchmarking against national income in
his chapters 3 (public and private capital in
Britain and France), 4 (public and private
capital in Germany, Europe, USA and
Canada) 5 (public and private capital in
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2014
split), 8 (the composition of top earners in
France and the USA), and 9 (income
inequality in different nations). This kind
of benchmarking is his operational
trademark.
British Journal of Sociology 65(4)

2. Which is an issue which Piketty is clearly
aware of, for instance in his reflection on tax
havens (2014: 521–4).
3. It is interesting that he is most attentive to
the question of international transfers when
in his policy chapters, when talking about the
need for global financial transparency.
4. See for instance the significance of outli-
ers in the top 10 per cent, top 1 per cent, and
even the top 0.01 per cent that he examines
in 2014: Figures 8.3 and 8.4).
5. Here, interestingly, Piketty treads a
similar ground to the anthropologist Marilyn
Strathern.
6. The fact that Piketty has no data on any
of the (sometimes former) communist
nations (with the partial exception of China)
is a key limitation of his analysis, and it
would surely be fascinating, though presum-
ably impossible, to bring these into his terms
of reference.
7. USA, Germany, Britain, Canada, Japan,
France, Italy, Australia.
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