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Hidden behind these pure numbers, however, are radical changes within society. According to Piketty, states used their tax revenues in order to build welfare state structures. With the loss of significance of the super-rich, and a new relation between the state and the market, a new middle class em…

[...] Only a few years afterwards, however, it underwent a drastic reduction. One reason for this was of course the loss of wealth in the form of ‘war damages’. A further reason was the devaluation of financial wealth in the form of government bonds: government bonds were already held in the eighte…

[...] if all people owned an equal amount of wealth, all of them would equally profit from a strong growth of capital. In fact, however, wealth is unequally distributed, according to Piketty. He does not explain why that is. Rather, he assumes inequality as a given, and examines its development ove…

So, even before Thomas Piketty’s book, the topic of ‘inequality’ had arrived in the economic mainstream, and with the following line of argumentation: inequality and poverty are no longer regarded so much as a consequence of capitalist economic growth, but rather as a brake on such growth and as a …

[...] Interest, in the restricted sense it is given in economic theory, cannot be produced without producing its negative counterpart, disinterestedness. The class of practices whose explicit purpose is to maximize monetary profit cannot be defined as such without producing the purposeless finality…