Debt: the First 5000 Years

If so, it would actually be possible to see almost all systems of established authority—religion, morality, politics, economics, and the criminal-justice system—as so many different fraudulent ways to presume to calculate what cannot be calculated, to claim the authority to tell us how some aspect of that unlimited debt ought to be repaid. Human fr

The most remarkable thing is that even in Adam Smith’s examples of fish and nails and tobacco being used as money, the same sort of thing was happening. In the years following the appearance of The Wealth of Nations, scholars checked into most of those examples and discovered that in just about every case, the people involved were quite familiar wi

It seems to me that this is exactly what the primordial-debt theorists are doing: projecting such a notion backwards. Really, the whole complex of ideas they are talking about—the notion that there is this thing called society, that we have a debt to it, that governments can speak for it, that it can be imagined as a sort of secular god—all of thes

Este livro, portanto, é uma história da dívida, mas também recorre a essa história a fim de fazer perguntas fundamentais sobre o que são os seres humanos e a sociedade humana, ou sobre o que eles poderiam ser — sobre o que realmente devemos uns aos outros e até o que significa fazer essa pergunta.

All human interactions are not forms of exchange. Only some are. Exchange encourages a particular way of conceiving human relations. This is because exchange implies equality, but it also implies separation. It’s precisely when the money changes hands, when the debt is canceled, that equality is restored and both parties can walk away and have noth