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.