Lionel Urman/Sipa via AP Images
French economist Thomas Piketty in 2019
While reading Brooke Jarvis’s fascinating New Yorker essay about issues associated with the ending—rather than the extending—of life, I came across this passage:
“Of all the forms of inequality,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said in 1966, by which time the divide was entrenched, “injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman.” Even in modern American cities, people born into poor neighborhoods can expect to live as many as thirty years fewer than people who are born in affluent ones across town. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic further widened our existing gaps.
The same day I read this, I got a notice about the upcoming paperback publication of the sequel to Thomas Piketty’s incredible 696-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The first book, you may recall, had an enormous impact on defining economic inequality as central to the nation’s problems and helped to lay the groundwork for the issue to become a hallmark of Democratic campaigns ever since. It led me to wonder why Piketty’s second book, Capital and Ideology, had not appeared to have a remotely similar role in at least inspiring debate. One obvious reason was its length: more than a thousand pages (I admit to not finishing it). A second was the unlucky timing of its publication tied to the beginning of the pandemic. (I am far more personally familiar with this phenomenon than I would like to be, alas.) But there’s more to the story and, in light of the book’s upcoming paperback publication, I thought I would turn to its translator, Art Goldhammer, to ask him his thoughts about what happened. Art was good enough to contribute to the below.
Translating Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (C21c) back in 2013 put me at the center of a publishing phenomenon. The book became an overnight best-seller. I had previously translated something like 125 books in my career, including Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory, but Piketty’s outsold all the others put together, with sales of more than 2.5 million to date.
When, in 2018, Harvard University Press asked me to translate the sequel, Capital and Ideology, I was of mixed minds. I had decided to retire and hoped to devote myself to a novel. But like Vito Corleone, the Press made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
When the manuscript arrived, two things were immediately clear: The second book, at 1,085 pages, was more than 25 percent longer than the first, and at first blush it looked even less likely to become a best-seller. Piketty had spent the six years since completing C21c studying history, and the new book contained extensive material on medieval property relations, the French Revolution, slavery in the Caribbean and the United States, India, Russia, China, Sweden, and a good deal more.
It was quite breathtaking to watch a world-famous author reinventing himself and his project. Some of the material was familiar to me. In fact, many of the French sources cited in the footnotes were books I had previously translated. But much was new, so I would be learning on the job—a challenge that helped keep me motivated.
The work went more quickly than anticipated. I was familiar with Piketty’s style, and his sentences went smoothly into English. Still, it was a summer of no respite as I put in eight-to-ten-hour days, day after day, translating more than a thousand pages as well as the captions to hundreds of graphs and tables, a tedious but essential part of the work. Just under six months after starting work, I was done.
The book is really four books in one: The first part lays out a bold historical thesis; the second extends Piketty’s work on wealth and income distributions to a new set of countries; the third shifts to political science and an examination of changing voting patterns in the wealthy democracies over the past 75 years; and the fourth is a set of policy proposals aimed at democratizing the European Union and redistributing not just wealth and income but life chances throughout the world.
With the manuscript complete, my thoughts turned to the book’s reception. Would it do as well as its predecessor? It seemed unlikely. The phenomenal success of C21c caught everyone by surprise. That book had come out at a propitious moment. The Occupy Wall Street movement had put the matter of growing inequality front and center, and its framing of the issue as “the one percent vs. the 99 percent” was drawn directly from the work of Piketty and his collaborator Emmanuel Saez. President Obama had declared inequality to be the paramount challenge of our times.
Paul Krugman mentioned the book in several New York Times columns and gave it a glowing review in The New York Review of Books. Another Nobel laureate, Robert Solow, touted the work in The New Republic. Krugman and yet another Nobel prizewinner, Joseph Stiglitz, appeared with Piketty at a public discussion of the work in New York, which drew national attention. The author triumphally toured the U.S., figured on a magazine cover as “the rock star of economics,” and met with the secretary of the Treasury. For once, the stars had lined up just right.
For Capital and Ideology, the alignment proved less favorable. For one thing, Paul Krugman did not like the book. I confess that, as I was translating, I often asked myself, because of Krugman’s role in the success of the first book, what he would make of the argument. My hunch was that he was unlikely to appreciate Piketty’s perspective. For all his shrewdness as a political commentator, Krugman remains a mathematical economist at heart: What he admires most are models that clarify the way the world works, and in Piketty’s first book he thought he had found an important one.
At the end of that book, however, Piketty had alluded to his wish to escape the straitjacket of mathematical economics and stated his admiration for the Annales school of French historians, pioneers in the study of social history over the longue durée. The new book is in part the story of Piketty’s re-education as a historian. For Piketty, the point was that history needn’t have turned out as it did. From the wrong turns taken in the past he sought to derive correctives applicable to the present. This was lost on Krugman, who did not follow Piketty in his “historical turn.”
If Krugman’s cool response was predictable, the second strike against a repeat of the earlier success came as a bolt out of the blue: The book’s launch coincided with the onset of the COVID lockdown. Harvard’s Center for European Studies, where I am an affiliate, invited Piketty to give the first annual Stanley Hoffmann Memorial Lecture on March 6, 2020, just as Capital and Ideology was appearing in bookstores. As it happened, that was also the day that bottles of Purell first began to appear in Harvard buildings as news of the COVID threat spread. I recall a conversation with Thomas about whether COVID would turn out to be as serious as some people were saying. Of course, it proved to be far worse than either of us could have imagined.
After the lecture, Piketty flew home to France, but he was scheduled to return to the U.S. a few weeks later to begin a promotional tour. I was to appear with him at an event at Stanford and had already bought my plane ticket. But everything came to a sudden halt, and the tour was abruptly canceled. Although sales to date have been quite respectable for a book of this kind, there would be no repeat of the miracle of C21c.
Odds and Ends
I really enjoyed the first season of Tyler Mahan Coe’s podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones, in which he told long, deeply researched, and deeply discursive stories about country music artists the Louvin Brothers, Bobbie Gentry, Jeannie C. Reilly, and Merle Haggard, among many others. This season is an incredibly detailed and even more discursive chronological history of the Nashville Sound as told through the life and career of George Jones. There have only been two episodes put up so far, but it’s really well done: fun, fascinating, and deeply informative.
Last week in my Mets obsession, I forgot to link to this fun and silly ten-minute video: “The Best Last Best Plane Ride Ever.”
Also last week, I put up that, um, difficult-to-understand argument about the state of Jewish studies. If the topic really interests you, then I’d strongly recommend this essay by the estimable Shaul Magid, which tells the story of the discipline from inside and out (but which I think could have used more emphasis on the role of its funders).
I really love the “Playing for Change” videos. They are guaranteed to put you in a good mood, even if the state of the world (or of “change”) does not really justify it. Among my favorites:
“Iko Iko”
“Ripple”
“Biko”
But you can fool around with the site and find your own, and maybe send them some dough when you do.
