‘The deep challenge of Piketty’s work,’ [Mike] Savage argues, ‘is that it urges us to examine whether the 21st century is now receding from this vision of modernity, and we are instead marked by a cyclical process of return as the weight of the past increases.’ […]

Against the backdrop of the new inequality paradigm, Savage proposes that sociologists rethink some of their most basic assumptions about the nature of time and space. In place of the modernist idea of chronology, in which individuals and societies are continually uprooted from tradition and thrust into the unknown, a proper appreciation of wealth inequality forces us to consider time in terms of ‘duration’. It isn’t just wealth that gets passed down from one generation to the next, but costs and risks too. The historical injustice of persistent inequality casts a material shadow over the present, so that contemporary crises—climate breakdown, the pandemic—can be understood as legacies of our predecessors, not as sudden or unforeseeable eruptions. Rather than being a ‘storm’, as Walter Benjamin described it, history is a perpetual process of sowing and reaping. Liberal democracy struggles to sustain authority under these conditions, because elections are experienced as mere staging posts in a historical longue durée, rather than as possible turning points.

William Davies, “Destination Unknown”