Before Thomas Piketty, there was Bernard Sanders. “The American people are angry,” he declared on the Senate floor in 2012. “Angry that the middle class is collapsing because of the Wall Street-caused recession  . . .  angry that unemployment is sky-high, that 50 million people lack health insurance, and that working families can’t afford college for their kids.” Sanders went on to recite statistics about the skewed income distribution in a country still reeling from a severe recession.

It was another year until Piketty’s magnum opus on the dynamics of inequality in capitalist societies, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, burst onto the scene. Battles for economic redistribution found a new intellectual undergirding. But we still seem a long way from enacting such a program in practice, especially with the electoral defeats of Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

Piketty’s long-awaited sequel, Capital and Ideology, might help us understand why. If the goal of his first book was to describe the evolution of income and wealth inequality in the industrial countries, this new work focuses on the persistence and legitimation of such inequalities. Every capitalist society comes up with its own justification for a particular set of property rights. Piketty defines ideology rather straightforwardly as a “set of a priori plausible ideas and discourses describing how society should be structured.”