Ideologies and Utopia: A Ricoeurian Reading of Thomas Piketty

Benoît Walraevens

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: In his most recent books, Piketty offers a global history of ine-quality in its economic, social, political, and intellectual dimensions, ar-guing that history is moved by the struggle of ideologies. To take part in this battle of ideas, he conceives a new ideal model of society, ‘participa-tive socialism', as an egalitarian alternative to the dominant neoproprie-tarian ideology and to the dangerous resurgence of nationalism and pop-ulism. This paper provides a new interpretation of Piketty's view of his-tory and of his participatory socialism in light of Paul Ricoeur's study of the dialectics of ideology and utopia. First, I present Ricoeur's singular analysis of ideology and utopia, which he sees as two inseparable facets of social imagination. Then I show how Ricoeur's concepts can be fruit-fully applied to Piketty's conception of history and to his conception of a new form of socialism for the 21st century, drawing lessons from history and forming a ‘good' or ‘realist' utopia. Finally, I demonstrate that this interpretation of Piketty's socialism can help to better understand some of the criticisms he has received. © 2023, Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. All Rights Reserved.

Keywords: ideology; participatory so-cialism; Piketty; realism; Ricoeur; utopia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ger, nep-his, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-pke
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04195650v2
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 2023, 16 (1), pp.1-27. ⟨10.23941/ejpe.v16i1.673⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-04195650v2/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04195650

DOI: 10.23941/ejpe.v16i1.673

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().