Towards a political and historical economy. Reflections on the capital in the twenty-first century

The article is a T. Piketty’s response for the main criticisms made by the scholars in the framework of the discussion held by the “Annales: History, Social Science” in 2015. It is proposed to treat capital in the context of the socio-economic approach without division into disciplines, but on the contrary - interdisciplinary, and it gives a chance to build a multidimensional model of capital and its relations with society. Capital considered in long-term historical perspective is an important factor in economic development and even the key cause of economic leadership of developed countries. A comparative study of trends in the development of return on capital and labor income allows us to construct two scales: the hierarchy of property and labor income hierarchy. It is suggested to reconcile the theory of financial capital of Karl Marx and the theory of cultural capital of Pierre Bourdieu, which should contribute to the development of the political and historical economy as well as the research of inequality of social classes.