Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is as much a sociological as an intellectual phenomenon. Like Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind, it is a tome that unexpectedly captures the zeitgeist. Few read all of Bloom’s volume—for the good reason that it was mainly turgid—but it spoke to a moment in which many felt that liberals and leftists were wrecking American education, if not America itself. That feeling in fact has not abated, and Capital in the Twenty-First Century can be situated in the same force field, with the difference that Piketty comes from the left and the terrain has shifted from education to economics. Even within education, the debate has largely moved to economics, the barriers that give rise to separate and unequal schooling. Piketty’s book bespeaks the palpable upset that American society, indeed, the world’s societies, seems increasingly rigged; that inequality is worsening and darkening the future. Capital in the Twenty-First Century might be more aptly titled Inequality in the Twenty-First Century.

It is pointless to criticize Piketty for what he has not claimed to do; but it is also insufficient simply to celebrate him. Many have addressed the extent he draws upon or deviates from Marx, but the issue may be more how he illuminates our contemporary plight. Nevertheless, especially in regard to his preoccupation with equality, Marx may be relevant. To consider together the twenty-first century Frenchman and the nineteenth century German foregrounds a divergence. Both protest economic disparities, but move in opposite directions. Piketty advances into the domain of salaries, income and wealth; he wants to temper these extremes and give us—to alter the slogan of the ill-fated Prague Spring of 1968—capitalism with a human face. Marx advances into the domain of commodities, work, and alienation; he wants to undo these relations and give us a transformed society.

Piketty is relentless in his indictment of inequality: “It is long past the time,” he writes in his introduction, “when we should have put the question of inequality back at the center of economic analysis.” The book’s epigraph is the second sentence of the Declaration of the Rights of Man: “Social distinctions can be based only on common utility.” (It is not clear why in his prolix book Piketty left out the first sentence: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.”) Piketty assembles a mountain of numbers and tables to demonstrate that economic inequality is intensifying; that the wealthier are wealthier; and that the rich own more. Some critics have challenged his statistics, but have landed only glancing blows. Meanwhile Piketty has offered a robust retort to their charges.

Piketty hits bullseye after bullseye about the exacerbating inequalities that disfigure society—especially American society. To pluck out from his book an example of inequality in schooling, which is not his focus, Piketty notes that education supposedly offers roughly equal access to all in order to promote social mobility. He calculates, however, that “the average income of the parents of Harvard students is currently about $450,000,” which corresponds to the top 2 percent of the income hierarchy. In a typical understatement, he writes that “such a finding does not seem entirely compatible with the idea of selection based solely on merit.”

For some leftists, this is old news. For others, who suffer from the relentless blather about why the minimum wage cannot be raised; why “job creators” cannot be taxed; and why American society remains the most open in the world, Piketty is what the doctor ordered. For instance, according to a report—not mentioned by Piketty—the top 25 American hedge fund managers earned $21 billion in 2013, well over twice as much as the combined income of approximately 150,000 American kindergarten teachers. That means the work of one hedge fund manager equals the work of about 17,000 kindergarten teachers.