In last month's European parliament elections eurosceptic and extremist parties won 25% of the popular vote, with the biggest gains chalked up in France, the UK and Greece. These results were widely, and correctly, interpreted as showing the degree of disconnect between an arrogant European elite and ordinary citizens.
Less noticed, because less obviously political, are current intellectual rumblings, of which French economist Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a withering indictment of growing inequality, is the latest manifestation. We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the neo-liberal capitalist consensus that has prevailed throughout the west since the 1980s and that many claim led to the economic disaster of 2008-2009.
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