Piketty’s account of the past 40 years is less a story of capital being unleashed (as most histories of neoliberalism have it) than of progressive ideologies running out of steam. The failure of communism played a crucial role in this, producing a new fatalism about the capacity of politics to deliver equality. Globalisation eroded national borders, while “hypercapitalism” delivered concentrations of wealth not witnessed since 1914. In the context of post-socialist ideological cynicism