Every human society needs to justify its economic, social, and political inequalities. It must find their causes, otherwise the political and social structure is at risk of collapsing. These justifications contain some truth, but also exaggeration, imagination, and pettiness, idealism and selfishness. Through political discourse and conflicting ideologies that are produced, usually one or more dominant narratives emerge on which the regimes of inequality are based.

The subject of this monumental book is the history and future of regimes of inequality. By gathering historical material from societies that are very distant from each other, both chronologically and geographically, the great thinker and social scientist Thomas Piketty seeks to contribute to a better understanding of ongoing transformations and, above all, to demonstrate how fragile the narrative that has dominated the past two centuries is in legitimizing inequalities. According to this narrative, modern inequalities are fair, as they manifest within a freely chosen process where everyone has equal opportunities for access to the market and property, and thus automatically benefits from the accumulations of the wealthier, who are the most active from a business perspective, the most deserving and useful.

This narrative has led today to contradictions, the forms of which are very different between Europe and the United States, India and Brazil, China and South Africa, Venezuela and the Middle East. The different paths that emerge from the local histories, and which partly intersect, are now, in the early 21st century, increasingly interconnected. Only through a supranational approach, such as the one adopted by Piketty, can we overturn the dominant narrative and establish a new, alternative narrative for future societies.