Debt: The First 5,000 Years [ハードカバー]

This is a very interesting and important book. Graeber's writing style is engaging and provocative, enjoyable and fascinating.

Graeber has been accused as being overly political in his interpretation of history and anthropology. There is a warrant of truth to this accusation, but Graeber is dealing with highly political, and deeply moral, dilemmas which dominant history and have implications for contemporary circumstances, an apolitical book would be impossible (many philosophers of science (right and left), including myself, reject Hume's Law or the radical distinction between facts and values, really that is all Graeber has done).

At the same time Graeber is conducting anthropological science at its best and scholarship that is interesting to all human beings concerned with the distributional inequalities within the United States and between nations.

Below I attempt to divide the book into six major theses, in so doing it can be seen that the first five theses are historical and scientific, only the last is political. In other words, the politics and science can be logically separated.

Given Graeber politics should non-leftists read this book, Yes! Graeber's book is destined to become a classic text. Graeber has the spirit of F. A. Hayek, not politically, but rhetorically. Hayek's <<The Road to Serfdom>> (1944), is a highly political book (from the right) but with a very important major thesis, namely if the (philosophical) <<ends>> of intervention cannot be agreed upon, predatory politics will be the manifestation. Hayek's economics are impeccable, his social theory intriguing, his analysis of politics second to none, and his understanding of history impressive. If a leftist cannot learn from Hayek, and if a rightist cannot learn from Graeber, the impoverishment and the political bias is much more the reader, not the author.

What does one find in Graeber's book? The primary thesis can be identified as `the duality of debt' (my term not Graeber's). On the one hand debt has a type of ontological expression, i.e. debt is what binds us as a species, e.g. we are indebted to our parents, family, culture, society for our well-being and personal development, and more theologically an indebtedness to the Cosmos/God. This side of debt is found in its expression (i.e. language) and development. On the other hand debt has an historical existential tendency to be employed to enslave or create circumstances of debt peonage.

Graeber's interpretation of contemporary debt is that it has this "duality," it binds us socially (enabling many people to start a life) and has a tendency to (too often) put borrowers in a debt peonage relationship, not with the plantation owner, but with contemporary banks.

If the primary thesis can be expressed as "the duality of debt" there are several other major theses of considerable interest. I identify six major theses.

(1) Debt predates money

This is important for several reasons. I will mention three. First money does not emerge with markets, which means that markets and money can be differentiated and analyzed independently. Second, if money was not needed for market activity, this begs the question of why it was invented. Third, the social properties, i.e. non-market properties of money may be crucial to understand it as a phenomenon (actually this historical interpretation impressively compliments Post-Keynesian theories of money and the contradictions of its functions, which is not mentioned by Graeber); (this thesis is borrowed and developed from the anthropological work of Mauss and "definitive" work of Humphrey).

(2) Government construct national markets

Public intervention is the root of markets. Non-intervention, or laissez-faire is an historical oxymoron (this thesis is borrowed and developed from the work of Karl Polanyi).

(3) Primordial debt theory

The argument here is that debt is the basis of social-being. This is the ontological/theological side of debt (i.e. we owe our parents, etc.). Money is invented to quantify certain types of debt. Now the tricky part is that monetary policy and social policy are necessarily linked and cannot be differentiated (this thesis is borrowed and developed from Aglietta and Orlean).

(4) Military-coinage-slavery complex

Historically the emergence of coinage (i.e. money) is linked with military efforts, which in turn tend to manifest debt peonage situations and enslave. The most simple example is a monarch, in order to pay a traveling army, issues a token/coin and proclaims all subjects of the kingdom must return a said amount of these coins to the monarch. The only way to get these coins is from the soldiers by providing them with some provisions, the soldiers pay in coin, and the subject/agent gives the coin as a tax back to the monarch (this thesis is borrowed and developed from Ingram). What Graeber adds to this story is that it is quite common that the tax generates indebtedness, the indebtedness generates circumstances of debt peonage and enslavement (sometimes temporarily, sometimes for life). He also demonstrates this is not simply a European phenomenon, but global throughout history.

(5) Historical attitudes toward debt/World cycles.

Whereas the first four theses were borrowed from various theorists, that Graeber then helps to confirm from anthropological studies, which he then synthesize and develops, thesis five is quite unique to Graeber. His thesis is that attitudes toward debt not only change over time (he identifies four the Axial Age 800 BC - 600 AD, Middle Ages 600 - 1450, Capitalistic Age 1450 - 1971, Something Yet to Be Determined Age 1971 - future), but attitudes are also cyclical and global (Europe, China, India, Africa, etc.). Broadly Graeber argues that the Axial Age tended to emphasize the quantification of debt, whereby debt peonage and slavery from debt was common; the Middle Ages were a time when the primordial debt was emphasized, and debt peonage tended to be resisted; the Capitalistic Age is a return to the quantification and systems of slavery and debt peonage; in the SYBD Age we see a resistance toward debt peonage and the dominance, not of monarchs, but toward financiers and banks begin to slowly emerge. Whether the resistance will continue or a return to debt peonage (e.g. owing money to a bank for life) will continue or whether there may be some new institutional arrangement whereby the importance and dominance of financiers and banks is reduced is yet to be determined.

(6) History removes the veil of debt as road to servitude and peonage

The idea here is that when we witness different existential debt peonage throughout history, this helps to shift our own thinking on debt. Why is it we must borrow money from a bank to start our life? Although this aspect of Graeber's argument is not anthropology, it is a highly important implication from the scientific and historical investigations of debt. If the contemporary circumstances are not analogous to the past, why not? (Notice: it really is only here that Graeber is purely normative. But it is a normative question that must be asked. His answer makes it political. However, his anthropology and scholarship strongly supports his politics).

This is a very powerful book on several fronts. It is a very impressive synthesis of several different theories in economics, history, anthropology, literature and sociology (this part constitutes a very impressive scholarship) and develops a uniquely Graeberian interpretation and implication. I highly recommend it and predict it will become a classic in economic anthropology.

As most of the other reviewers have noted, this is a brilliant and revolutionary book. The author has synthesized a great deal of information from anthropology, history and economics over 5,000 years to come up with a compelling and original account of debt. The accomplishment is even greater, because he makes clear that debt is intimately related to money, capitalism, war and slavery; so understanding debt will change your view of all these things.

The bad news is the author made some inexplicable choices that may cause many readers to discount or misunderstand the book. The first is to continually emphasize abusive practices associated with debt: predatory or fraudulent lending, debt for consumption, debtors' prison and enslavement for debt. Only on the edges of the story, usually under the term "commercial debt," will you see what a debt defender would emphasize: informed and non-desperate parties agreeing voluntarily to a contract in which the lender supplies funds to buy assets expected to return more than the interest rate on the debt, and agrees that if the venture fails she will own the remaining assets but have no personal recourse against the borrower. If the venture succeeds, the lender gets repaid with interest and the borrower gets any additional profit as compensation for his efforts. If the venture fails, the lender takes a loss (or at least gets a lower rate of return than would compensate for the risk) and the borrower has nothing to show for his work. No courts, no violence.

Someone might argue that the violent practices are inherent to debt and abusive loans are far more common than loans of mutual advantage. But the author doesn't argue this. Anyway, the points would be irrelevant to his thesis. The book discusses the fundamental idea of debt and the conclusions apply equally to the best and worst loans. There is a lurid focus on the most egregious actions related to debt, in most cases of which debt merely provides some euphemistic terms for violence and robbery (like a carjacker "borrowing" your car or a bully "paying back" your imagined insult with a punch). I found the material exaggerated and unconvincing. Terrible things have been done in the name of debt, but the book presented little evidence that the terrible things wouldn't have been done anyway, nor was there any attempt to weigh the amount of debt abuse against the amount of mutual benefit from legitimate debt. The material is likely to mislead casual readers into thinking this is a hysterical anti-debt screed when it is in fact a brilliant and subtle examination of the nature of society.

Even more important is a key omission. Nowhere does the author mention the most important point about money and credit--that they stimulate extraordinary technological and cultural change. No nonspecialist would care about Neolithic exchange practices if they hadn't revolutionized humanity with the adoption of agriculture, permanent settlements, technological change and long-distance trade networks. The Athenian owl coin would be a minor curiosity except that it ended thousands of years of civilizations rising and falling leaving little behind but crumbling ruins and dead language texts. Every society that joined the money web since has had its language and technology preserved for other societies to build upon. This did not lead to steady progress but it did lead, for the first time in human history, to progress. Paper money in Reformation Europe led to technologies that conquered the world, and not just militarily.

Whether you like that progress is another matter. Or you may feel we could have had the progress without all the evils associated with money and debt--even that money and debt were effects not causes of the changes. Regardless, leaving technological progress out of the story makes an unbalanced account.

Finally, one of the author's key points is that debt can have the effect of ripping a person out of social context to be treated as a source of repayment rather than a friend, neighbor, son and so on. This is a brilliant point, well-argued and important. But it has an obverse side the author misrepresents. Some people run away from traditional societies and small towns for the anonymity of a city. They shed what they consider the burdens of social ties to create and join less personal organizations. Debt in its quantified and impersonal form was undoubtedly created by these types of people.

The author treats social refugees as either evil or deluded. If unsuccessful, they are caught in a debt trap that destroyed everything of meaning in their lives. If successful, they are addicted to the pursuit of money, which cannot buy them happiness. In fact, many people have at least some tendencies in these directions at some points in their lives. Some are mainly escaping intolerable or suffocating situations. Others are looking for excitement and adventure. Or they may want to pursue ideas that require wider contacts (and therefore relatively impersonal and rational human relations) than their traditional social ties can provide. Not everyone who flees the family farm is after world domination or mindless stockpiling of gold. You'd think someone who didn't understand this would spend his time arguing with his friends and teaching his children, not writing a book.

This is a great book, but it could reach a wider audience if the author spent less time bashing creditors (and Europeans, if anything bad happens in the book and a European male is within a hundred years and a thousand miles of it, you know who will get the blame) and more serious time on the people who like debt and the changes they cause in the world. Perhaps he disputes the conventional views of these things, in fact I think that's a near certainty, but ignoring them makes his insights hard to connect with anything else.

Everyone talks about debt but I can't think of anyone else who has so deeply explored its role in our history and culture. This book goes FAR beyond a discussion of debt issues in contemporary capitalistic society (thought it does plenty of that too). Graeber has done amazing research into debt's role in religion, revolutions, and political power systems across cultures and throughout history, and he has come up with surprising, counter-intuitive, and provocative results. This book will completely change the way you think about economics, morality, power systems, philosophy, and money.