Holmwood John
School of Sociology, University of Nottingham.
Br J Sociol. 2014 Dec;65(4):607-18. doi: 10.1111/1468-4446.12104.
This article offers a 'local', British, reading of Piketty's landmark book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, suggesting that the challenge it offers to sociological approaches to inequality is more fundamental than hitherto recognized. The variations in 'national trajectories' exposed by Piketty reveal Britain to be anomalous in terms of standard approaches to the path dependencies embedded in different welfare regimes. Using the recent work of Monica Prasad on 'settler capitalism' in the USA and the tax and debt-finance regime associated with it, the article suggests that colonialism and empire and its postwar unravelling has had deep consequences for British social stratification, albeit largely neglected by British sociologists. Finally, it points to the fact that the form of tax and debt-finance regime that has become reinforced in Britain is at the heart of recent radical reforms to higher education. These are the currently unexplicated conditions of our future practice as sociologists and, therefore, an obstacle to building a critical sociology on the foundations laid out by Piketty.
本文对皮凯蒂具有里程碑意义的著作《21世纪资本论》进行了一种“本土化”的、英国视角的解读，认为它对社会学不平等研究方法提出的挑战比迄今所认识到的更为根本。皮凯蒂揭示的“国家发展轨迹”差异表明，就不同福利制度中路径依赖的标准研究方法而言，英国是反常的。本文借鉴莫妮卡·普拉萨德近期关于美国“移民资本主义”及其相关税收和债务融资制度的研究成果，指出殖民主义、帝国及其战后的解体对英国社会分层产生了深远影响，尽管英国社会学家大多对此忽视。最后，文章指出，在英国强化的税收和债务融资制度形式是近期高等教育激进改革的核心。这些是我们作为社会学家未来实践目前尚未得到解释的状况，因此也是在皮凯蒂奠定的基础上构建批判性社会学的障碍。
