2018م - 1444هـ
Sociologias



Introduction

On his well-known study, Le Capital au XXIe siècle (2013), the

French economist Thomas Piketty praises the 19th century

European literature’s way of representing society and its huge

class inequalities. In particular, Piketty has in his mind Honoré de Balcaz’s

(1799-1850) and Jane Austen’s (1775-1817) novels that describe the

effects of the 19th century’s sharp class hierarchies “with a verisimilitude

and evocative power that no statistical or theoretical analysis can match”

(Piketty, 2014, pp. 2, 53-4, 105-6, 113-6). In these respects, those novels

offer us even a more accurate picture of the 19th century class society

than the social and historical sciences are capable of doing.

Literary scientists do not necessarily share Piketty’s view. Since the

latter half of the twentieth century, literary studies have widely abandoned

the thought that literary works could offer us genuine knowledge of the

world.