Hello! My name is Henrique Darlim. Welcome to my annotations on the first three chapters of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years. I'm a History graduate trying to learn web development but also continuing to explore philosophical and historical problems that interests me. One of them, and the reason behind the reading of Graeber's book, is the history of money and debt.

Now, as to why this topic interests me: in the beginning of 2022 I became a student of The New Centre for Research & Practice. One of the available courses was instructed by Colin Drumm, whose PhD dissertation is mentioned in the annotations below, and was aptly named Signs, Designs and Sovereignty. In a deeply ironic fashion, this course provided me the opportunity of perceiving how History was more relevant to every problem society struggles with nowadays than I—who should already have this in mind after 4 years studying its themes in college—had previously thought.

Besides, the course also made me think about the insufficiencies of the framework I had chosen to interpret the world with, i.e., Marxist theory. It originated the idea of Marx being fatally wrong already on his assumptions. Debt, then, hammered the nail in the coffin in this regard since it shows already at the second chapter, e.g., how the history of money as a progression from barter towards currency with its end in credit is simply and historically wrong. Of course, this is not the most appropriate medium for such a critique, so I stop here.

I've constructed this site as a certificate project for freeCodeCamp's Responsive Web Design course. It stands as a kind of homage to the importance of Graeber, who died suddenly from an acute pancreatitis in 2020 and seems to deserve almost 500 lines of HTML code dedicated to his book, which is also the reason why this site doesn't cover the whole book. It would take too long.

If you're interested in seeing my other web development projects or reading the things I write, feel free to access it here. Happy reading and thank you!

• The IMF squeezing third world countries into debt in exchange of their continuous underdevelopment
• Dissection of the thought “debts must be paid”
  • Debts are above morals but also pertaining to it
  • “Debts must be paid but there are exceptions X and Y and Z…”
  • Relation of power: who has the power to not pay debts? And who must always pay them?
• Debt justify violent relations as moral ones
• Two examples: debt is above the mere victory or a loss at a war
  1. Madagascar: Lost the battle against France. Conquered by France, demanded to pay for the construction of railroads, bridges and plantations.
  2. Haiti: Won the independence war but was demanded to pay for France to recognize their sovereignty, suffered embargoes from the USA from 1806 onward. More on this: Henochsberg, Simon. “Public Debt and Slavery: The Case of Haiti (1760-1915).” Paris School of Economics, n.d.
• Debt and sovereignty do not relate to each other in a simple way. Debt ≠ power ≠ sovereignty. However, power makes the debt of a country that owes every other country a moral thing or simply not a real problem; absence of power, consequently, gives a highly indebted country a awful position in relation to its peers.
  • Example: the USA guarantees its powers even in debt, which is astoundingly high, because of their military bases all over the world, especially in countries that depend on their debt. Military and economic power → moral and ‘real’ power.
• Jean-Claude Galey and the Himalayas
  • Division between the vanquished (low castes) and the moneylenders (landlords and Brahmins)
• The Church and usury
  • Always a complicated relation; excommunication from the 12th century onward joined by prohibition from participation in sacraments, including the prohibition of burying usurers in hallowed ground
• Jewish people
  • Only permitted to earn a living through activities related to usury. They would then be persecuted by the people in power who would take their money. A self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
• The quantitative aspect of debt transforms the obligation to pay it into something impersonal, beyond human — it can trample other moral obligations, justifying violence.
  • This aspect is not found in other moral obligations
• The 2008 crisis
  • Through the trust of everyone on the financial actors it reached a critical point in which the loans were revealed to be scams
  • They consisted of operations like selling poor families mortgages crafted in such a way as to make eventual default inevitable; taking bets on how long it would take the holders to default; packaging mortgage and bet together and selling them to institutional investitors […] claiming that it would make money no matter what happened, and allow said investitors to pass such packages around as if they were money; turning over responsibility for paying off the bet to a giant insurance conglomerate that, were it to sink beneath the weight of its resultant debt (which certainly would happen), would then have to be bailed out by taxpayers (as such conglomerates were indeed bailed out). (Graeber, 2014, p. 15)
  • Public opinion favoured not helping banks to recover and instead focusing on helping the indebted people. But the government did the opposite and financial corporations started asking for more punishment of those who were in debt. Graeber even invokes the image of the debtors' prisons of once upon a time and the punishment debtors could receive: a ear nailed to a post for display. The IMF already argued for the impossibility of maintaining such an economy: an eventual collapse would be the result.

• Antecedent of the myth of barter: Aristotle imagined the emergence of money from specialization, a thought which continued until the 16th century, when it died out thanks to what Europeans travelers experienced regarding money all over the world
• Adam Smith is the founder of the modern version of the myth of barter
  • Naturalization of barter & exchange
  • The way of money
    1. Tribal specialization leads to division of labour
    2. Establishment of money occurs first as irregular iron ingots then as standardized coins
    3. Necessity of government to control coinage
• Absence of evidence for barter & abundance of counter-evidence
• Barter happens between strangers, usually between unknown tribes converting desire for violence against the unknown into rituals & dances
• For economics to exist, it must imagine exchange as isolated from war, politics, culture, sex, death — the need for the isolation of economics from other human aspects is found also in Aglietta, Michel. Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power. London; New York: Verso, 2018.
• In Graeber's example, Henry owes Joshua. The question is then: owes what? There could be here a necessity of money but contrary to this what really happens is the establishment of a ranking of types of things. So if there are three categories of things in their society, something from the first one can only be exchanged for something in the same category, in a kind of delayed exchange. Anthropology calls these levels spheres of exchange.
• Barter is modern, not ancient
  • In fact, there is good reason to believe that barter is not a particularly ancient phenomenone at all, but has only really become widespread in modern times. (Graeber, 2014, p. 37)
  • Scarcity of money seems to lead to barter, with the development of a specific currency sometimes appearing, for example: the use of cigarettes in prisons
  • Rise of a credit system because of the scarcity of money, e.g., the Carolingian empire maintaining the old imperial currency
• Smith’s examples actually portray people familiar with money, mostly using it not as a medium of exchange but as a unit of account. Graeber mentions how in reality barter appears when people accustomed to money don’t have any of it to use and then need to improvise with barter. So it’s a post-monetary relation.
  • Dried cod: fishers selling the fish using pounds, shillings and pence as their price; traders annotating this value as credit in their books, used to pay for supplies — Smith saw this as a direct exchange relation, fishers exchanging fishes for supplies
  • Note 31
    • A moment’s reflection shows that a staple commodity could not be used as money, because ex hypothesi, the medium of exchange is equally receivable by all members of the community. (Graeber, 2014, p. 404) apud Mitchell-Innes, What is Money?, 1913, 378.
    • It's not currency: it's credit!
  • The example of the Scottish Village is also problematic: in Smith’s time, it was common for workers to only receive payment after a long time, since employers didn’t have coins. The employees then could take home what they produced or some leftover materials, using it to pay off debt they owed to pub owners, for example. In short: another system of credit.
  • Tobacco was used as credit during harvest in Virginia. Similarly, West Indian merchants needed to get involved in the sugar trade: their wealthier customers usually paid off their debts with sugar.
• Modernity saw credit as a consequence of absence of currency but there is evidence of credit preceding money.
• Mesopotamia used a credit system before the invention of coinage
  • There was a system of accountancy already developed in 3500 B.C., organized in independent city-states
  • It’s easy to see that ‘money’ in this sense is in no way the product of commercial transactions. It was actually created by bureaucrats in order to keep track of resources and move things back and forth between departments. (Graeber, 2014, p. 39)
  • 1 silver shekel = 1/60 mina; 1 mina = 60 silver shekels = 1 ration of barley
    • Temple administrators received 2 portions of barley per day. In a 30 day month, that meant 60 mina or 3600 silver shekels.
  • Debt calculation in silver — rents, fee, loans. Control of the temple administrators. Made through the system described above.
    • So silver was used not as currency, but as a unit of account. There were not much silver actually circulating at that time — the silver that did circulate was in the form of rude bars or chunks and not in the form of coins
    • The silver was maintained inside the temples and palaces, guarded for long stretches of time
    • Even so, and maybe because of this, there were no coins nor a system of standardization or stamping because there were no obligation of debts being paid in silver although their value was calculated in silver
  • Debts paid in barley, directly or indirectly
    • The ration of money was fixed and related to barley because debts were usually paid in barley. Other forms of payment included: goats, furniture, lapis lazuli
    • Merchants rarely had silver to use in commercial transactions so they also had to resort to credit.
• In synthesis, the usual history about the origins of money is bullshit and does not stand up to actual historical evidence
  • Mitchell-Innes tried to rewrite this history showing how credit was and is more important than coins in the history of money but he was ignored by economists.
  • If we had to reduce the history of money to a linear development, which it isn’t by any measure, it would look more like the backwards version of the popular view: Credit → Coins → Barter

• The myth of barter is integral to economics’ discourse. That’s why economists can reject Smith’s labor theory of value but not his barter story
• There is a relation between Smithian economics and Newtonian physics — a systematization of a perfectly organized market with the invisible hand playing the part of divine providence [cf. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments], including also the proper founding of a discipline, an area of study
  • In the end, there is an absence of explicitly theological arguments, since economics established itself as a discipline, but also a presence of its skeleton
• Economists see money as a distraction, as a veil covering and obscuring the ‘simple’ relation of barter — ‘Every transaction involving money is just barter with extra steps’ (Paul Samuelson, for example) combined with ‘money is just a commodity, nothing else’
• Cash ≠ money: cash circulates as currency; money is a unit of account
  • Even when economies ‘revert to barter,’ as Europe was said to do in the Middle Ages, they don’t actually abandon the use of money. They just abandon the use of cash. In the Middle Ages, for instance, everyone continued to assess the value of tools and livestock in the old Roman currency, even if the coins themselves had ceased to circulate. (Graeber, 2014, p. 45)
  • This distinction is important because money is usually conflated with its functions, unit of account, medium of exchange and store of value are substituted in metonymy by simply money. So they ‘reverted to barter’ abandoning the medium of exchange function and using money as unit of account.
• The worldview of economists, that say we are “a collection of individuals and nations whose main business is swapping things” (Graeber, 2014, p. 45), is made possible by money but it isn’t a necessary step in the development of money. The first economists forced the rest of society as viewing this relationship as a necessary one: if there’s money, there’s homo oeconomicus. As Graeber notes, if this were true economics qua discipline would have been created in Sumer and not by Smith in 1776.
• But how this happened? Government policy. The British government was trying to create the market as being this separate domain of workers exchanging things with employers or customers
• Usage of law, police and monetary policies
  • Pegging the value of currency to silver and increasing money supply, focusing on small change in circulation
  • Necessity of tin and copper as materials and consequently the regulation of banks
  • Usage of paper money pegged to silver
• Failure in the creation of two preceding central banks: France and Sweden. In each case, the would-be central bank issued notes based largely on speculation that collapsed the moment investors lost faith. Smith supported the use of paper money, but like Locke before him, he also believed that the relative success of the Bank of England and Bank of Scotland had been due to their policy of pegging paper money firmly to precious metals. (Graeber, 2014, p. 45)
• Mitchell-Innes was contrary to this view. Money for him was credit and not simply a commodity.

• Mitchell-Innes: Credit Theory of money.
  • Popularized not in England (Mitchell-Innes was English) but in United States and Germany
• Credit Theorists insisted that money is not a commodity but an accounting tool. In other words, it is not a ‘thing’ at all. You can no more touch a dollar or a deutschmark than you can touch an hour or a cubic centimeter. Units of currency are merely abstract units of measurement, and as the credit theorists correctly noted, historically, such abstract systems of accounting emerged long before the use of any particular token of exchange. (Graeber, 2014, p. 46)
  • Money as abstract unit of account
  • Money measures debt: money is an IOU
  • A critique of this vision can be found in: Drumm, Colin. “The Difference That Money Makes: Sovereignty, Indecision, and the Politics of Liquidity.” Dissertation, University of California, 2021. pp. 30-32.
• Conventionally a banknote is considered to be a promise to pay an amount of ‘real money’. Credit Theorists present the banknote as a promise to pay something with the same value of the amount of ‘real money’ (gold, silver etc)
• According to Credit Theory, money as credit is birthed out of the following relation:
• A gives X to B
• B is in debt in the value of X to A
• A gives B an IOU
• Instead of redeeming this IOU when A have something useful, B passes this IOU to somebody else that the also owes
• B gives C the IOU A gave before to him
• This can proceed continuously with no end if everybody continues to trust A
  • In fact, if it goes on long enough, people might forget about the issuer entirely. Things like this do happen . The anthropologist Keith Hart once told me a story about his brother, who in the '50s was a British soldier stationed in Hong Kong. Soldiers used to pay their bar tabs by writing checks on accounts back in England. Local merchants would often simply endorse them over to each other and pass them around as currency: once, he saw one of his own checks, written six months before, on the counter of a local vendor covered with about forty different tiny inscriptions in Chinese. (Graeber, 2014, p. 47)
• The value of one currency is the measure of trust in other humans
• The main problem: why would people continue to trust this IOU?
  • What if someone forged A's signature on the piece of paper? There rises some distrust and then it’s only a matter of time for the whole system of trust to crumble.
  • So this system cannot explain bigger societies. To use a word Graeber uses, in the case of ‘dispersed’ communities, there is no realistic way of people keeping track of each other.
    • First sub-problem: trust in dispersed societies.
  • The other consequence of adhering to this view is that the number of tokens would be insurmountable in any medium-sized society. Each transaction would have to be made using IOUs. Even in a single day, the necessary quantity of tokens is huge and all of this should return to A. In Graeber’s words: To be able to guarantee all of them, Henry would have to be almost unimaginably rich. (Graeber, 2014, p. 47)
    • Second sub-problem: number of tokens. This is less of a problem in case Henry was someone important in his society, maybe a king or a noble.
• G. F. Knapp’s State Theory of Money
  • Emperors and kings usually concern themselves with units of measure. If money is simply a unit of measure, emperors and kings will have to occupy themselves also with thinking about money.
  • In the 12th century Western Europe was still using the system of measurement put in place by Charlemagne (pounds, shillings and pence) although:
  1. Some of the coins attributed to him were not minted by him.
  2. By that time nonee of the coins that he minted were circulating.
  3. The coins that remained circulating varied hugely in size, purity, weight and consequently in value.
  • All of this, for the Chartalists, doesn’t matter. What matters is that there is a >stable uniform system of measurement of debts and credits.
  • The empire of Charlemagne dissolved quickly but this system endured for a long time: from his time around the 9th century to the French Revolution at the end of 18th century.
  • For Knapp, real physical money doesn’t need to correspond to the imaginary money. The medium of exchange doesn’t need to correspond to the unit of account.
  • ‘Currency is what the state accepts for the payment of taxes’. If the state accepts dried cod as a mean of paying taxes, it is because of this a valid medium of exchange.
• The tally stick was a common form of currency found in Henry’s II time (1154-1189)
  • The creditor would keep one half, called ‘the stock’ (hence the origin of the term ‘stock holder’) and the debtor kept the other, called ‘the stub’ (hence the origin of the term ‘ticket stub.’) Tax assessors used such twigs to calculate amounts owed by local sheriffs. Often, though, rather than wait for the taxes to come due, Henry's exchequer would often sell the tallies at a discount, and they would circulate, as tokens of debt owed to the government, to anyone willing to trade for them. (Graeber, 2014, p. 48)
  • So the person would buy a tally with a discount and then sell this tally to someone else with a profit
• The IOU can be money until the debt is paid: the IOU only has value if the debt has value, if the value of debt reaches 0, i.e., the debt is paid, the value of the IOU is also 0
  • The establishment of the Bank of England in 1694 obeyed this logic. English bankers lend £1,2 million to the king William III. They got monopoly on the issuing of banknotes and the king could lend money on lower interest compared to private creditors. What this meant in practice was they had the right to advance IOUs for a portion of the money the king now owed them to any inhabitant of the kingdom willing to borrow from them, or willing to deposit their own money in the bank—in effect, to circulate or ‘monetize’ the newly created royal debt. (Graeber, 2014, p. 49)
• The Chartalist approach helps to answer the question of why taxes exist.
  • Why did kings gave money to their subjects and then demanded their money, at least in part, back? Graeber notes that if the kings wanted to tax simply because of money it wouldn’t make sense since kings could just — and they did — take control of gold and silver mines.
  • The obligation of returning money to the king was created in order to markets to exist. Markets and money are both not natural, they do not appear spontaneously.
  • On the other hand, if one simply hands out coins to the soldiers and then demands that every family in the kingdom was obliged to pay one of those coins back to you, one would, in one blow, turn one's entire national economy into a vast machine for the provisioning of soldiers, since now every family, in order to get their hands on the coins, must find some way to contribute to the general effort to provide soldiers with things they want. (Graeber, 2014, p. 49-50)
  • So there is also a relation between the appearance of markets and armies.
  • Example of the forceful creation of markets: France conquest of Madagascar. The people there were taxed in a new currency and fell into debt while growing accustomed to desire consumption goods associated with France.

• The reasons why anthropologists haven't been able to come up with a simple, compelling story for the origins of money is because there's no reason to believe there could be one. (Graeber, 2014, p. 52)
• Graeber believes money is not a thing but a way of comparing things proportionally. Cf. Drumm, 2021 for what I think is a better interpretation of what money is. In short, a bunch of different things are termed money, obscuring their difference.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a narrative about credit and debt. At least this is what Credit Theorists propose. For more on this. But this doesn’t work as a myth of creation.
  • The commodity theorists (Smith & Marx, for example) have the upper hand due to the fact that they possess a compelling, although completely false and fabricated, story about how money became what ‘it is’ and the state-money theorists don't.
  • State-money theorists, however, prevail when the results of liberal policies start to destruct the system. Think of the 1929 crisis, for example.
• Keynes understood money was a creature of the state. This not necessarily meant it created money but simply that it regulated money.
• The Myth of Primordial Debt
  • Motivated by the debates over the nature of the euro.
  • Michel Aglietta, Andre Orléans, Bruno Théret.
  • The core argument is that any attempt to separate monetary policy from social policy is ultimately wrong. Primordial-debt theorists insist that these have always been the same thing. Governments use taxes to create money, and they are able to do so because they have become the guardians of the debt that all citizens have to one another. This debt is the essence of society itself. It exists long before money and markets, and money and markets themselves are simply ways of chopping pieces of it up. (Graeber, 2014, p. 56)
  • First there is debt then the state is created and regulates this debt. Afterwards, the state creates money as a way to create markets.
    • First there is debt then religion regulates this debt. The state captures this function of religion, creates money and markets. This lead Aglietta and Orléans to study the early Sanskrit literature.
    • The early Vedic poems (1500-1200 BC) are filled with concerns over debt and requests for the gods to free the worshiper from it.
    • In these hymns, Yama, the god of death, figures prominently. To be in debt was to have a weight placed on you by Death. To be under any sort of unfulfilled obligation, any unkept promise, to gods or to men, was to live in the shadow of Death. (Graeber, 2014, p. 56)
    • Later in the Brahmanas, a kind of commentary on Vedas, birth is already considered a debt. Sacrifice of animals functioned as a substitution of the death of the debtor.
  • Primordial-debt theorists pose that these problems of debt are part of human thought and not a historical contingency.
  • Every human being is indebted to the gods that created them — Every human being is indebted to the society that made possible their existence: Taxes are just a measure of our debt to the society that made us. (Graeber, 2014, p. 59)
  • The problem persists. The conversion of life-debt into money is strange because money measures value of different things by nature. Besides, by which process someone’s moral obligations can be transformed into a definite quantity of money? And how it gets transformed even more into an systematized machine of account?
    • Their answer: taxes are the representation of our debt to society. In some way, they start to be understood as something negative, associated with guilt and sin. Individuals who have wronged us are indebted to us and vice-versa. From the moment there is an attempt to calculate the overarching debt to society, these micro-debts are obviously taken into account too.
• Anthropology is generally ignored by economists. The use of shells or feathers as money is ignored because they are not used to buy and sell things. They aren’t a medium of exchange in the usual sense. These kinds of money are used to rearrange social relations, such as marriages or personal disputes.
• There is every reason to believe that our own money started the same way—even the English word ‘to pay’ is originally derived from a word for ‘to pacify, appease’—as in, to give someone something precious, for instance, to express just how badly you feel about having just killed his brother in a drunken brawl, and how much you would really like to avoid this becoming the basis for an ongoing blood-feud. (Graeber, 2014, p. 60)
  • According to Graeber, the debt theorists skip this first form of money and proceed directly to the period in which money is connected to law
• Germanic law codes used Roman money as unit of account
  • The establishment of law codes affirming the punishment in money for crimes is interesting. How to arrive at a system of equivalences by way of comparing unequal things, and what is worse, coming from a form of gift exchange?
  • People know when they are robbed in an exchange but not the exact amount of this robbery. The need to calculate a precise amount comes from the fact that the consequences of owning a specific object can be way worse than just getting robbed by its previous owner.
    • On the other hand, if Joshua's pig just destroyed Henry's garden, and especially, if that led to a fight in which Henry lost a toe, and Henry's family is now hauling Joshua up in front of the village assembly—this is precisely the context where people are most likely to become petty and legalistic and express out­ rage if they feel they have received one groat less than was their right­ful due. (Graeber, 2014, p. 61)
  • The need for establishing a large pool of equivalences: if A commits a crime and needs to pay for it, the government must accept what A has for a penalty. The punishment is paid with corn but A doesn’t have corn. He has barley instead. The penalty must be adjusted to the value in barley then.
• Graeber affirms that these theorists are not describing a myth but creating another one
  • It can be a compelling myth, as he notes, but at the same time it doesn’t make sense to think we owe an infinite debt to humanity, since a debt is usually thought of as something that will be paid someday.
  • The fact that they based much of their material in the Vedic texts is relevant, according to Graeber. Because we don’t really know much about the society that produce the Vedas.
• Sacrifice and payment are understood as equal only in the arguments of the authors associated with debt theory. They paint it as if this was in the evidence when actually it isn’t. There is no evidence of payment = sacrifice in societies we know much more of.
• The notion that debts to gods were appropriated by the state, and thus became the bases for taxation systems, can't really stand up either. (Graeber, 2014, p. 63) Free citizens didn’t pay taxes. Conquered people did. Mesopotamia, Persia, Classical Greece worked like this.
  • Taxes were seen consequently as something tyrannical by the Greeks. Graeber uses Moses Finley to affirm this.
• nonee of this, however, deals a mortal blow to the state theory of money. Even those states that did not demand taxes did levy fees, penalties, tariffs, and fines of one sort or another (Graeber, 2014, p. 63)
  • Despite this, it’s still strange to reconcile the evidence with the theory that states were created to be guardians of primordial debt.
  • Graeber notes how these theorists practically ignore Mesopotamia. It was both the place where (i) the first documented practices of money loans with interest appear and (ii) one of the first states is being created, so it would make sense for them to be interested in comprehending it. But Mesopotamia goes contrary to what they usually predict. So like the economists they choose to ignore it.
• Mesopotamian kings instead of imposing public debt, usually cancelled private debts.
• It’s probable that loaning with interest precedes writing so it’s hard to know when this practice began
  • Graeber affirms that Temple administrators might have invented them to finance caravan trade: Mesopotamia was rich in grain and livestock, consequently in wool and leather. But that’s the end of it. Metal, stone, wood, silver, all had to be imported. Temple administrators advanced products to local merchants with interest and then they would profit of it.
  • By 2400 BC the practice had spread to the point of merchants and officials advancing loans to peasants, usurping their possessions in case they didn’t pay what they owe. First, products and animals; then family members.
  • Debt-peonage: they were sold as servants and they would be released of this condition only when they paid their debt. But the problem is: if the borrower had already taken all of their possessions, how could they amass sufficient money to clear the debt? They couldn’t.
• The practice of clearing the consumer debts in Sumer was created to contain the social disruption brought by bad harvests. Farmers with too much debt would join semi-nomadic groups that lived in the frontiers. Commercial debts were not cleared.
  • All land was returned to its previous owner and the individuals returned to their families.
  • In Sumeria these received the name of ‘declarations of freedom’: freedom in Sumerian (amargi) means literally ‘return to mother’
  • Again, really different from primordial-debt theory.
• Primordial-debt theory begs the question by assuming the world is divided into neatly arranged territorial blocks called ‘societies’ whose individuals know they are part of this specific society. But as Graeber correctly points out historically people didn’t perceive the world in this way. If the theory is based on an infinite debt to society that is later transferred to the gods or to an individual ruler, the concept of ‘society’ must be real in order to the argument to work. There is impossibility in calculating the value of the debt and also to know to whom the owe it. And who defines how this should be paid?
  • Histori­cally, this is very rarely the case. Imagine I am a Christian Armenian merchant living under the reign of Genghis Khan. What is "society" for me? Is it the city where I grew up, the society of international merchants (with its own elaborate codes of conduct) within which I conduct my daily affairs, other speakers of Armenian, Christendom (or maybe just Orthodox Christendom), or the inhabitants of the Mongol empire itself, which stretched from the Mediterranean to Korea? Historically, kingdoms and empires have rarely been the most important reference points in peoples' lives. (Graeber, 2014, p. 66)
  • The feeling of pertaining to a grand mass of land, a country or nation, and not to another is recent.
• The ultimate problem is that commercial debt is not of the same nature as the moral debts mentioned by these authors.
• The concept of ‘society’ cannot describe a whole range of human organizations such as the medieval ones since the development of the nation-state hadn’t happened. For Graeber, primordial-debt theorists err in applying this concept to the past.
  • 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 these ideas emerged together around the time of the French Revolution, or in its immediate wake. In other words, it was born alongside the idea of the modern nation-state. (Graeber, 2014, p. 69)
• Influence of August Comte
• Durkheim: there is no need for a religion of society since Gods are representations of society. The problem of determining the value of the debt and to whom it must go to dissipates when everything is owed to the state.
• What Graeber calls the great trap of the twentieth century:

  Logic of the market	Logic of the state
  Everybody is an individual who owes nothing to one another	Everybody has an impossible to pay debt to society

• But this it false. States created markets and from that point onward could not continue without markets.