"I'm Trying to Answer the Same Questions as Karl Marx"；10本翻譯成英文的小說

He didn’t think we knew anywhere near enough about the basic facts of inequality, and that our theories, our explanations of what we did know, whether inherited from Karl Marx, Simon Kuznets, or Genghis Khan, were deeply inadequate.

So like a climber at the base of Mt Everest, he planned a route and proceeded slowly, step by step—year by year, in his case—to find and analyze the relevant information, working with some formidable colleagues, notably Emanuel Saez and Tony Atkinson, the godfather of inequality studies—and whose own Harvard book Inequality: What Can Be Done will appear two months from now at the extremely reasonable price of $29.95. You can place an order with the waiters.

So given Thomas’s heavyweight reputation, when asked if it was pretentious to say that he was working on a modern version of Das Kapital, I explained that there would be plenty of time to talk about all that sort of stuff after he signed a contract.

We’re very lucky that he did sign, and placed his faith in us.

What he produced is one of the most important books of the century so far, a masterful compilation and distillation of data on 200 years of inequality, combined with bold theoretical interpretations of its rise and fall and its possible future—and with a non-revolutionary set of ideas for moderating it.

The Hawkins award is, obviously, above all else for that intellectual achievement.

But it’s a publishing award too and I would like to credit the collective effort of my colleagues at Harvard. It takes a lot of people to take Word files that arrive by email and transform them into more than half a million 3-lb. blocks of paper and distribute them around the world from Timbuktu to Tuktoyaktuk.

We didn’t know, of course, that the book would sell that number. But it wasn’t the case either that we treated it as a run-of-the mill book and then hammered the reprint button with panic and delight when it turned out otherwise.

We received the 250,000-word manuscript in French on May 8, 2013. And on May 7, 2014, 364 days later, the book hit #1 on the NYT best seller list.

That’s a real achievement of planning, execution, and foresight.

Art Goldhammer, the peerless translator, deserves special mention for turning the manuscript into exceptionally clear and elegant English not only at record speed, but while recovering from cancer.

The book had phenomenal support at the top from Bill Sisler, Susan Boehmer, Susan Donnelly, Tim Jones and Richard Howells. And I’d like to credit a few people who quietly got on with the sort of work that everyone here knows makes such a difference not just to the end product but also to the process of getting there smoothly: production editor Kate Brick, editorial assistant Joy Deng, designer Graciela Galup who made a cover that is now an icon, and two publicists, Lisa LaPoint and Rebekah White, who have had to plant a microchip in Thomas’s shoulder so they can tell the media where on the globe to find him at any given instant.

I’d also like to say why the book is an ideal symbol of the power and potential of academic publishing.

I think the demand for the book is in part a demand for the real thing, for genuine substance, for knowledge you can rely on about a matter of vital importance. You can disagree with aspects of the book, but that’s in part because there’s something there to disagree with.

This isn’t the French theory we sometimes like to ridicule, wilfully obscure and at times indifferent to truth and even meaning. It’s French theory of an older sort. It’s a grand project steeped in the Enlightenment tradition of grappling with difficult truths and explaining them in the clearest terms possible to as many people as possible.

In academic publishing, we don’t, of course, always reach vast numbers of people, and our authors aren’t always beacons of clarity. But we are, more than publishers in any other corner of the industry, committed to the project of getting complicated things right, to telling the truth, and to figuring out what subjects it’s worth saying anything about in the first place. Other publishers put portraying the world accurately and fairly lower in the list of priorities. In that sense, Piketty’s book is a calling card for the sort of work we all try to do every day.

One final thing.

The book has changed academic debate, but it has also affected the world. It’s done so in numerous ways, one of which I read about recently.

It’s really nice to think, especially when we talk about the pace of technological change in the industry, that one of the things that helped to change the world a little bit in 2014 was in the humble technological form of the book.