Piketty misreads Austen.

• Author: Braun, Carlos Rodriguez
• Position: Thomas Piketty - Jane Austen

Thomas Piketty's best-seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) uses literary references to reinforce its main theme, and from the outset he says that nineteenth-century novels are helpful in understanding relative wealth in those times and ours. Together with Balzac's work, he claims, "the novels of Jane Austen ... paint striking portraits of the distribution of wealth in Britain ... between 1790 and 1830," "grasp[] the hidden contours of wealth and its inevitable implications for the lives of men and women, including their marital strategies and personal hopes and disappointments," and "depict[] the effects of inequality with a verisimilitude and evocative power that no statistical or theoretical analysis can match" (2). (1)

This article argues, however, that, despite how interesting such a use of Austen's works might be, Piketty disappointingly presents a distorted picture of them. Austen, in fact, recognized that the society of her time was much more dynamic and mobile than Piketty suggests. Piketty also ignores Adam Smith, who is present in Jane Austen's works through a key principle of his theory of conduct and economic growth: human beings do not strive to be equal but to be better.

The Patrimonial Society

In order to prove that Austen's world was "the classic patrimonial society," Piketty repeatedly recalls an episode in one of her books that conveys the idea that, as in the old zero-sum fallacy, wealth is not created but only inherited and disputed. Accordingly, entailment was the reason for the misfortune of Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility: the Norland estate passed directly to their father and half-brother,

John Dashwood, who decided, after considering the matter with his wife, Fanny, to leave them nothing. The fate of the two sisters is a direct consequence of this sinister conversation. In Persuasion, Sir Walter's estate goes directly to his nephew, by-passing his three daughters. Jane Austen, herself disfavored by inheritance and left a spinster along with her sister, knew what she was talking about. (362) This last remark overlooks the well-known fact that Jane Austen had received in 1802 a marriage proposal by a rich heir and turned it down, though she was far from being wealthy (MacDonagh 1991, 39-40). She would later achieve success as a writer, but she did not live much longer, dying in 1817 at the age of forty-one. In any case, she did not want to be an amateur: "being a professional writer was, apart from her family, more important to her than anything else in her life" (Fergus 2011, 2). Like her heroines, she was a woman who chose freedom, knew the value of money, dwelled profusely on the subjects in her novels, and refused to marry without love (Austen 1982, henceforth WJA, 369; see also 911).

Piketty's point, however, is not the novelist's life but the notion that at the core of the world of her writings is a large, petrified, and unavoidable inequality. As the rich were a "fairly numerous social group" (411), he tries to sidestep this difficulty, arguing that their wealth "was totally out of reach for anyone content to practice a profession, no matter how well it paid" (619), an absurd statement that Piketty himself qualifies, albeit in a footnote: you could, after all, acquire a certain fortune through your work (412 n. 37). (2)

He chooses to focus on Sense and Sensibility, a story in which, unlike others by Austen, the protagonists do not work (MacDonagh 1991, 43). This facilitates Piketty's theme that wealth is something that you merely have and do not earn and that this situation does not change: "In Sense and Sensibility.; the kernel of the plot (financial as well as psychological) is established in the first ten pages in the appalling dialogue between John Dashwood and his wife, Fanny" (413). It is true that John and Fanny become very rich by inheriting Norland, which brings them four thousand pounds a year. Other characters live pretty well with much less; the limit appears to be six hundred pounds (WJA, 691-92, 915), the annuity received by John Willoughby: "this is no doubt the reason why he soon abandons Marianne," remarks Piketty, as if his abandonment has to do exclusively with wealth and not with personal traits. Piketty remarks that John Dashwood, "[b]y accepting the advice of the odious Fanny and refusing to aid his half-sisters or to share one iota of his immense fortune, despite the promises he made to his father on his deathbed, ... forces Elinor and Marianne to live mediocre and humiliating lives. Their fate is entirely sealed by the appalling dialogue at the beginning of the book" (414). The sisters' fate is anything but sealed, as any reader of Sense and Sensibility knows, but the contentai the dialogue between Fanny and John is indeed appalling.

One of my referees reminded me that with five hundred pounds a year, the sum that John finally allots to them, the Dashwood girls and their mother are living on several times the average income of a working household during Austen's time. (3) They can hire more than one servant. Accordingly, to argue that the girls are relegated to lives of mediocrity and humiliation is not reasonable. Austen's world is in fact one where deprivation is very relative for all her major characters at her time.

Another thesis Piketty raises is that inequality is not only bad and unsolvable but necessary: "one can read between the lines an argument that without such inequality it would have been impossible for a very small elite to concern themselves with something other than subsistence: extreme inequality is almost a condition for civilization" (415). This statement is rather strange. Piketty could have pointed to the more notorious fact that all nonprimitive human communities have ranks and are thereby more unequal than the hordes of original humanoids, as the early reflections on society highlight, including Adam Smith's when he recognizes and deplores the disposition to admire the rich and the powerful. Piketty instead seems to suggest a sort of conspiracy: someone wishes to fool us with the false idea that if we want civilization, we must accept extreme inequality, the degree of which is left conveniendy imprecise. He repeats:

these nineteenth-century novelists describe a world in which inequality was to a certain extent necessary: if there had not been a sufficiently wealthy minority, no one would have been able to worry about anything other than survival. This view of inequality deserves credit for not describing itself as meritocratic, if nothing else. In a sense, a minority was chosen to live on behalf of everyone else, but no one tried to pretend that this minority was more meritorious or virtuous than the rest. In this world, it was perfectly obvious, moreover, that without a fortune it was impossible to live a dignified life.... Modern meritocratic society, especially in the United States, is much harder on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the grounds of justice, virtue, and merit. (416) So the "merit" of inequality resides in being overtly declared, crassly arbitrary, completely unjustified, and totally unrelated to any real merit whatsoever. Here we have all of Piketty's ghosts, from his dislike of American capitalism (except Franklin Roosevelt's interventionism) to the idea that inequality is equivalent to "losing" to domination and injustice, something that he--along with many others, for that matter--proclaims but does not prove.

Piketty misreads Austen, whose vision is much more nuanced. He is, by the way, far from being the first to present Jane Austen as having conflicting views of economics or her work as having socialist overtones. David Daiches called her "a Marxist before Marx" and praised the "ruthless clarity" with which she described a gloomy world marked by unchangeable inequalities: "the fate of a well-brought-up woman was to find a suitable husband, or...