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Questions For Adams, Charles J. Palermo

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Thomas J. Adams’ review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century begs what I consider to be a vital question. In what follows, I want to pose that question. In that sense, I am criticizing Adams. I should say, further, that that is the only sense in which I understand myself to be criticizing Adams. I don’t aim to find fault with his general thesis, that by “eliding history, the terms of [Piketty’s] discussion imagine solutions without politics,” which is to say, without a good account of the history of inequality, you cannot have an effective, mobilized political engagement.