It’s a sign of the times that one of the world’s most prominent intellectuals has just published a book of essays titled Time for Socialism. As Thomas Piketty explains in the volume’s long introduction, “If someone had told me in 1990 that I would publish a collection of articles in 2020 entitled Vivement le socialisme! in French, I would have thought it was a bad joke.”

Yet for Piketty, like countless others across the world, the past three decades of what he calls “hypercapitalism” pushed him to question accepted truths about the prevailing economic system. And while the author still shied away from advocating socialism at the time of the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, his 2013 best-selling magnum opus on inequality, he’s now come to embrace the term — arguing that despite the baggage of its connotations of Stalinism, “It remains the most appropriate term to describe the idea of an alternative economic system to capitalism.”

There’s more to this than terminology. As Piketty explains, his embrace of socialism reflects his newfound conviction that “one cannot just be ‘against’ capitalism or neoliberalism: one must also and above all be ‘for’ something else, which requires precisely designating the ideal economic system that one wishes to set up.” Faced with rampant inequality and looming climate catastrophe, anger with capitalism is already widespread. What’s now needed above all, in his view, is a compelling and “clearly explained alternative.”