Public Finance of Body Politic: Piketty, Rousseau and Neoliberalism

This article attempts to address the problem of economic inequality through Thomas Piketty’s historical findings, and tries to point out the impact of Rousseau’s idea on Piketty’s public finance policy proposals to deal with inequality. In other words, it aims to emphasize to the relationship between equality and tax, besides the relationship between public finance and the notions laying at the heart of modern politics such as citizenship and popular sovereignty. In this sense, neoliberal change gives rise to inequality problems as well as necessitates the rethinking of modern political concepts. Putting emphasize on these requirements, it proposes that the counter-mechanisms of neoliberalism leads to a problem of political subject who is expected to intervene democratically to get equality, and the article concludes with the idea that this problem can not be solved within neoliberalism