La obra de Thomas Piketty supone una contribución significativa para el pensamiento crítico. Sus tesis han renovado el alcance de la reflexión económica tradicional y canalizado su atención al estudio de la desigualdad, un asunto fundamental en el capitalismo contemporáneo cuya reflexión se impone, asimismo, a la filosofía social. En un intento por dar cuenta de la profundidad de su planteamiento, en las siguientes líneas abordamos las tesis principales de su aproximación, centrándonos particularmente en la dinámica r>g que presenta en (...) El Capital en el siglo XXI. A continuación, examinamos las soluciones principales que propone para una mejor distribución de la riqueza y el aumento de la justicia fiscal, así como ciertos aspectos problemáticos de su enfoque. Se concluye señalando posibles aportaciones del pensamiento pikettyano a la reflexión teórica en vinculación con las teorías de Streeck y Harvey. (shrink)

Is realism in political theory compatible with utopianism? This article shows that it is, by reconstructing a highly restrictive realist approach to political theory for guiding legislation and public policy, drawn from the work of Adam Smith, and showing how it can accommodate Piketty’s utopian proposal for a global tax on capital. This shows not only that realism and utopianism are compatible; but how realist and utopian political theory can be carried out in concrete cases. This moves debates to more (...) interesting questions of which forms of utopianism are permissible within which forms of realism; contributes to moving the contemporary realism debates from a Methodenstreit to questions of how it can and ought to be done; and contributes to an important contemporary debate about the permissibility of utopian proposals for political and economic reform in general and Piketty’s proposed global tax on capital in particular. (shrink)

Contemporary egalitarian political philosophy has become increasingly interested in the ways the international order may protect or undermine states’ capacities to deliver domestic egalitarianism. This paper draws on Miriam Ronzoni’s helpful discussion of the various different ways in which both philosophical and practical commitments can move beyond a contrast between a world of closed societies and a cosmopolis to explore how successful the theorizing prompted by that interest has been. Problems scholars like Peter Mair and Wolfgang Streeck have suggested the (...) EU faces also suggest that there are difficulties views like Ronzoni’s have to overcome to usefully orient us towards the threats posed by the interactions between domestic and international politics. These problems can be usefully framed by what the intellectual historian István Hont called jealousy of trade and used to understand debates between members of what is commonly understood as the republican tradition, especially in the eighteenth century. Jealousy of trade revolves around the way that international economic competition intensifies international political competition, requiring the restructuring of domestic politics to ensure the survival of the state, which then further intensifies international economic competition. The ways of navigating and controlling the increasing costs of an increasingly belligerent international order eighteenth century political theorists found help illustrate the challenges contemporary internationalising egalitarians face. Isaac Nakhimovsky’s work on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s closed commercial state is, I argue, specially useful given the similarity of some of Fichte’s commitments to those of contemporary internationalising egalitarians. (shrink)