A précis of Piketty’s extensive research may be stated simply: capitalism should not be eaten raw. Capitalism, like sausage, is meant to be cooked by a democratic society and its institutions because raw capitalism is antisocial. As Piketty warns, “A market economy… if left to itself… contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.” Many scholars have taken to describing these new conditions as neofeudalism, marked by the consolidation of elite wealth and power far beyond the control of ordinary people and the mechanisms of democratic consent. Piketty calls it a return to “patrimonial capitalism,” a reversion to a premodern society in which one’s life chances depend upon inherited wealth rather than meritocratic achievement.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 136