ABSTRACT
The present state of industrial life seems to give a fair index of the existing separation of means and ends. Isolation of economics from ideal ends, whether of morals or of organized social life, was proclaimed by Aristotle. Working with a global team of co-researchers, the French economist Thomas Piketty has launched a formidable challenge to the currently dominant, liberal-technocratic paradigm of economic theory in his internationally influential book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In the critical phase of the contribution to resolving Piketty's dilemma, pragmatist philosophers can show that economics, politics, and law, as scholarly disciplines, are rife with ill-considered and outdated philosophical assumptions and apparently harmless, simplifying devices that drive many of their mainstream research methods and public-policy proposals. To attain personal morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.
