I am afraid I will bother you a lot in the coming weeks with my thoughts (but not prayers) while I am making progress in Piketty's "Capital and ideology". After having finished the first 200 pages, I found the most interesting discussion in the book how French revolutionairies /
coped with the issue of property after 1789. Piketty discusses one of the fundamental problems of the revolution. On the one hand, one of the first actions it undertook was to abolish all the priveleges of the aristocracy. On the other hand, it wanted to protect private /
property (not surprisingly, given that its figureheads were mostly well off bourgeois). As soon as principles had to be translated in practical measures, the new lawmakers ran into problems. Some cases were easy, to be sure. For instance, the tax exemption enjoyed by /
aristocrats were a privelege whose abolition did not enter into conflict with private property rights. But other cases were much more ambiguous. What with the rents received from the peasants? Were those inherited priveleges or the fruits of private property rights that needed/
to be protected? Picketty discusses how lawmakers tried to solve this problem by looking at the origins of the property. If the original acquisition of land had been the result of a voluntary commercial agreement, so the doctrine went, the rents were legitimate./
If, however, the land had been acquired by force, rent was an aristocratic privelege and was not legitimate. Given that some of those properties had been in the hands of aristocrats for centuries, it is not hard to see that it was very difficult to apply those principles /
in practice. Moreover, before codification there was a wide variety in local practices, and attempts to codify custom law exarcebated the problems when the same legal term meant different things in different places. /
It's also interesting to see how Piketty deals with those issues himself. While he is unapologitically partisan and left-of-centre, Piketty acknowledges that clearly defined and enforced property rights are a necessary condition for the functioning of society and he /
acknowledges the conundrum that while it might be true that if you go back long enough in time, any big fortune started with theft, this cannot serve as a basis for dealing with currently existing property rights. He is thus actually /
fairly mild when judging the work of the revolutionary lawmakers. He does ask though whether they shouldn't have focused on a different issue than whether the property rights were legitimate, namely the redistribution of (parts of) those rights through progressive taxation. /
To be sure, progressive wealth taxes were discussed in the last decade of the 18th century, but the idea was abandoned, lest it would open a Pandora's box that would eventually lead to marginal tax rates that would lead to total expropriation /
Here as well, Piketty is nuanced in his judgement: in a world that had no prior experience with progressive taxation, such fears were not completely unjustified, he writes. /
It is precisely because of this type of nuanced analysis that, based on what I have read until now, I strongly encourage everyone to read the book. In a world where a lot of discussions consist in ad hominem attacks and straw men arguments, /
Piketty shows that you can have strong opinions on an issue, and still take the arguments of people you disagree with seriously. We need more people like him.
