Synopsis:
A major argument of the book is that the imprecise, informal, community-building indebtedness of "human economies" is only replaced by mathematically precise, firmly enforced debts through the introduction of violence, usually state-sponsored violence in some form of military or police.
A second major argument of the book is that, contrary to standard accounts of the history of money, debt is probably the oldest means of trade, with cash and barter transactions being later developments.
Debt, the book argues, has typically retained its primacy, with cash and barter usually limited to situations of low trust involving strangers or those not considered credit-worthy. Graeber proposes that the second argument follows from the first; that, in his words, "markets are founded and usually maintained by systematic state violence", though he goes on to show how "in the absence of such violence, they... can even come to be seen as the very basis of freedom and autonomy".
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I think this book does a better job than almost anything else written over the last twenty years (maybe also David Harvey) of explicating the deep material history of how we have arrived at a current age where millions of dollars of corporate debt melts into air while 30k+ of compounding student loan debt will follow a vast percentage of Americans around for the rest of their lives.
I'm very interested in critique of his historical accuracy. I assume it almost all comes from political scientists and historians and almost none of it from anthropologists. The fact that I struggle to even say what "field" this book belongs to -- mass market socioeconomic history? -- points to both the book's value as well as its disciplinary precarity.
Well there's also anthropologists that disagree with Graeber, but mainly on his ideas about neolithic society or something.
Yes. Graeber really ignores and does not engage with societies that have some form of primitive communism and ignores a lot of the things that make them work or dismisses them outright
Maybe someone can remind me, but isn't it just because he's focused on the foundation of debt?
Iirc he wrote a long form article about how early societies were Anarchist/communist in structure even after the start of the early neolithic era.
I just don't remember if it's a switch in his thinking or if he just ignores it in debt because it's not the focus of the book.
Edit: Found the article it's mostly them dunking on Rousseau, but he argues there's a variety of both pre-neolithic and early neolithic societal organizations.
The point of that article was not that early societies were anarchist or proto-communist (though some could probably be fit into those Western definitions) but that our entire conception of stages of history is wrong.
Maybe I didn't say that the way I wanted to.
Not that the point of that article was organization of societies, just that in there it is mentioned how societies are organized differently which would be weird that he doesn't note that type of structure in debt.
Graeber is from a side of the anthropological field that wouldn't find the term "primitive communism" very handy or descriptive, and I think rightly so.