David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years is an outsize exposition of social, historical, and institutional constructions of value and the high political stakes they have for human societies. It spans an impressive gamut of practices ranging from religious beliefs about primordial obligation, 19th-century Positivist notions of "social debt," and the bond between states and the markets that parasitically rely on each other to survive.

In his Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel wrote, "just as a poem is not simply a fact of literary history, but also an aesthetic, a philological and a biographical fact - so the fact that two people exchange their products is by no means simply an economic fact" (52-53). People invest economic objects with a calculable value as if it were an inherent quality, though Simmel left the question of what value is or means as ultimately "unanswerable." Marx took a similar approach, notwithstanding his remarks on the element of unaccountability in money as an expression of frayed social relations.

Graeber's Debt offers a synthesis of transnational social practices concerned with value, exchange, and money but moves in an exciting novel and opposite direction. He situates debt as the quantification of promise and obligation and the threat of violence behind that calculation (in contrast to the complexities of obligation in self-cooperating civilizations, in what is usually referred to as mutual aid). Read more>>