Theorems, Theories, and Limits
From time to time, a French thinker writes a work that has
everyday use for Americans. Voltaire’s Candide, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Camus’
The Stranger come to mind. Add to
that list Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the
Twenty-First Century. Distracting rhetoric from Democrats and Republicans
about the widening gap between poverty and wealth in our country makes
listening to what Paul Krugman calls a “sweeping meditation on inequality” a
rather sobering exercise.
Piketty goes beyond the American boundaries of Robert B.
Reich’s The Work of Nations, which
alludes to Adam Smith’s class The Wealth
of Nations. He provokes liberal signifying on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. None of this is
surprising. What does take us aback is
the equation of Piketty with a “rock star,” in certain sectors of mass media,
as if his serious inquiry about inequality is as disposable as transnational
noise. It is not.
Piketty deserves to be critiqued seriously for what he
exposes about economics as a “contingent” science and about the limits of
explanation. Lacking the finite certitude of pure mathematics, economics is
culture-bound, determined by human choices and the amoral activities of Nature,
activities oblivious to the needs and desires of people, lesser animals, and
other life forms. Oddly, the efforts to trivialize the real value of Piketty’s
work only highlight why his theorems and reasoning are not “universal.”
Based on statistical analysis of megadata from France, the
United States, and Britain, Capital
neither address nor provides a model for addressing “universal” issues in the
global tragicomedy of capital. It is a Western tool that smashes complacent
thought about inequality in the United States; the tool simply breaks when it
strikes the economic walls of Asia and Africa. Alternative tools are needed.
Take Nigeria as a target for analysis of inequality in the
context of rampant neo-colonialism. Understanding of Nigerian inequality (and
perhaps that of other countries impacted by Islamic fervor) requires such an
instrument as Adetoro Rasheed Adenrele’s “Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria as a
symptom of poverty and political alienation,” Journal of Humanities and Social Science 3.5 (2012): 21-26.
Adenrele’s article lacks the Western elegance and rigor of
Piketty’s book, but it has the indigenous eloquence and specificity necessary
for dealing with inequality in such contemporary African societies as Mali,
Egypt, Senegal, and Libya. What it
models can possibly be expanded and adapted by Asian economists to deal with
the Asian giants China and India.
Adenrele’s use of fundamentalist theory, poverty theory, and corruption theory
is not sufficiently cold, but it inches toward solid explanation of capital and
human collapse. However divergent the work of Adenrele and Piketty might be,
the primal lesson to be learned from both thinkers is the inevitable
recognition of the limits of critical reasoning, the restriction of cognitive
capacity explored in David Faust’s The
Limits of Scientific Reasoning. Both thinkers raise crucial, non-universal questions
about inequality and apocalyptic journeys in history.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
April 20, 2014
