Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

this stage, I merely want to stress the fact that the loss of stable monetary reference points in the twentieth century marks a significant rupture with previous centuries, not only in the realms of economics and politics but also in regard to social, cultural, and literary matters. It is surely no accident that money—at least in the form of specific amounts—virtually disappeared from literature after the shocks of 1914–1945. Specific references to wealth and income were omnipresent in the literature of all countries before 1914; these references gradually dropped out of sight between 1914 and 1945 and never truly reemerged. This is true not only of European and American novels but also of the literature of other continents.