ABSTRACT
Economic differences among Americans, to be consistent with the founders' lofty rhetoric and ideals, had to be very different than the traditional concept of relatively fixed and impermeable classes developed in Old Europe. Piketty undermines the nation's long view of itself as a society free of harsh class divisions while discrediting also the idea that caste would disappear in capitalist America. Piketty shows that America has now become more like Old Europe, a society permanently divided between a tiny 1" class of dynastic wealth and a disinherited class of struggling workers, than is New Europe. People are a society organized around the intertwined inequalities of class and caste. To understand the class issue clearly, people need more clarity about the relation between inequality and class, and about the idea of class itself. Piketty argues that we need to put under the microscope the 1" of capitalist aristocrats if we are to understand the twenty-first century.
