<nettime> In Rousseau's footsteps: David Graeber and the anthropology of unequal society

[Keith Hart <keith@thememorybank.co.uk>]

A review of David Graeber *Debt: The first 5,000 years* (Melville House,
New York, 2011, 534 pages)

http://thememorybank.co.uk/2012/07/04/in-rousseaus-footsteps-david-graeber-and-the-anthropology-of-unequal-society-2/

Debt is everywhere today. What is ?sovereign debt? and why must Greece pay
up, but not the United States? Who decides that the national debt will be
repaid through austerity programmes rather than job-creation schemes? Why
do the banks get bailed out, while students and home-owners are forced to
repay loans? The very word debt speaks of unequal power; and the world
economic crisis since 2008 has exposed this inequality more than any other
since the 1930s. David Graeber has written a searching book that aims to
place our current concerns within the widest possible framework of
anthropology and world history. He starts from a question: why do we feel
that we must repay our debts? This is a moral issue, not an economic one.
In market logic, the cost of bad loans should be met by creditors as a
discipline on their lending practices. But paying back debts is good for
the powerful few, whereas the mass of debtors have at times sought and won
relief from them.

What is debt? According to Graeber, it is an obligation with a figure
attached and hence debt is inseparable from money. This book devotes a lot
of attention to where money comes from and what it does. States and markets
each play a role in its creation, but money?s form has fluctuated
historically between virtual credit and metal currency. Above all Graeber?s
enquiry is framed by our unequal world as a whole. He resists the
temptation to offer quick remedies for collective suffering, since this
would be inconsistent with the timescale of his argument. Nevertheless,
readers are offered a worldview that clearly takes the institutional
pillars of our societies to be rotten and deserving of replacement. It is a
timely and popular view. *Debt: The first 5,000 years* is an international
best-seller. The German translation recently sold 30,000 copies in the
first two weeks.

I place the book here in a classical tradition that I call ?the
anthropology of unequal society? (Hart 2006), before considering what makes
David Graeber a unique figure in contemporary intellectual politics. A
summary of the book?s main arguments is followed by a critical assessment,
focusing on the notion of a ?human economy?.

*The anthropology of unequal society*

Modern anthropology was born to serve the coming democratic revolution
against the Old Regime. A government by the people for the people should be
based on what they have in common, their ?human nature? or ?natural
rights?. Writers from John Locke (1690) to Karl Marx (1867) identified the
contemporary roots of inequality with money?s social dominance, a feature
that we now routinely call ?capitalism?. For Locke money was a store of
wealth that allowed some individuals to accumulate property far beyond
their own immediate needs. For Marx ?capital? had become the driving force
subordinating the work of the many to machines controlled by a few. In both
cases, accumulation dissolved the old forms of society, but it also
generated the conditions for its own replacement by a more just society, a
?commonwealth? or ?communism?. It was, however, the philosophers of the
eighteenth-century liberal enlightenment who developed a systematic
approach to anthropology as an intellectual source for remaking the modern
world.

Following Locke?s example, they wanted to found democratic societies in
place of the class system typical of agrarian civilizations. How could
arbitrary social inequality be abolished and a more equal society founded
on their common human nature? Anthropology was the means of answering that
question. The great Victorian synthesizers, such as Morgan, Tylor and
Frazer, stood on the shoulders of predecessors motivated by an urgent
desire to make world society less unequal. Kant?s *Anthropology from a
Pragmatic Point of View*, a best-seller when published in 1798, was the
culmination of that Enlightenment project; but it played almost no part in
the subsequent history of the discipline. The main source for
nineteenth-century anthropology was rather Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  He
revolutionized our understanding of politics, education, sexuality and the
self in four books published in the 1760s: *The Social Contract*, *Emile*, *
Julie* and *The Confessions*. He was forced to flee for his life from hit
squads encouraged by the church. But he made his reputation earlier through
two discourses of which the second, *Discourse on the Origins and
Foundations of Inequality among Men* (1754), deserves to be seen as the
source for an anthropology that combines the critique of unequal society
with a revolutionary politics of democratic emancipation.

Rousseau was concerned here not with individual variations in natural
endowments which we can do little about, but with the conventional
inequalities of wealth, honour and the capacity to command obedience which
can be changed. In order to construct a model of human equality, he
imagined a pre-social state of nature, a sort of hominid phase of human
evolution in which men were solitary, but healthy, happy and above all
free. This freedom was metaphysical, anarchic and personal: original human
beings had free will, they were not subject to rules of any kind and they
had no superiors. At some point humanity made the transition to what
Rousseau calls ?nascent society?, a prolonged period whose economic base
can best be summarized as hunter-gathering with huts. This second phase
represents his ideal of life in society close to nature.

The rot set in with the invention of agriculture or, as Rousseau puts it,
wheat and iron. Here he contradicted both Hobbes and Locke. The formation
of a civil order (the state) was preceded by a war of all against all
marked by the absence of law, which Rousseau insisted was the result of
social development, not an original state of nature. Cultivation of the
land led to incipient property institutions which, far from being natural,
contained the seeds of entrenched inequality. Their culmination awaited the
development of political society. He believed that this new social contract
was probably arrived at by consensus, but it was a fraudulent one in that
the rich thereby gained legal sanction for transmitting unequal property
rights in perpetuity. From this inauspicious beginning, political society
then usually moved, via a series of revolutions, through three stages:

The establishment of law and the right of property was the first stage, the
institution of magistrates the second and the transformation of legitimate
into arbitrary power the third and last stage. Thus the status of rich and
poor was authorized by the first epoch, that of strong and weak by the
second and by the third that of master and slave, which is the last degree
of inequality and the stage to which all the others finally lead, until new
revolutions dissolve the government altogether and bring it back to
legitimacy (Rousseau 1984:131).

One-man-rule closes the circle. ?It is here that all individuals become
equal again because they are nothing, here where subjects have no longer
any law but the will of the master?(Ibid: 134). For Rousseau, the growth of
inequality was just one aspect of human alienation in civil society. We
need to return from division of labour and dependence on the opinion of
others to subjective self-sufficiency. His subversive parable ends with a
ringing indictment of economic inequality which could well serve as a
warning to our world. ?It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature,
however defined? that a handful of people should gorge themselves with
superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities?
(Ibid: 137).

Lewis H. Morgan (1877) drew on Rousseau?s model for his own fiercely
democratic synthesis of human history, *Ancient Society*, which likewise
drew on an evolutionary classification that we now call bands, tribes and
states, each stage more unequal than the one before.  Morgan?s work is
normally seen as the launch of modern anthropology proper because of his
ability to enrol contemporary ethnographic observations of the Iroquois in
an analysis of the historical structures underlying western civilization?s
origins in Greece and Rome. Marx and Engels enthusiastically took up
Morgan?s work as confirmation of their own critique of the state and
capitalism; and the latter, drawing on Marx?s extensive annotations of *Ancient
Society*, made the argument more accessible as *The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State* (1884). Engels?s greater emphasis on gender
inequality made this a fertile source for the feminist movement in the
1960s and after.

The traditional home of inequality is supposed to be India and Andre
Beteille, in *Inequality among Men* (1977) and other books, has made the
subject his special domain, merging social anthropology with comparative
sociology. In the United States, Leslie White at Michigan and Julian
Steward at Columbia led teams, including Wolf, Sahlins, Service, Harris and
Mintz, who took the evolution of the state and class society as their chief
focus. Probably the single most impressive work coming out of this American
school was Eric Wolf?s *Europe and the People without History *(1982). But
one man tried to redo Morgan in a single book and that was Claude
L?vi-Strauss in *The Elementary Structures of Kinship *(1949). In *Tristes
Tropiques* (1955), L?vi-Strauss acknowledged Rousseau as his master. The
aim of *Elementary Structures* was to revisit Morgan?s three-stage theory
of social evolution, drawing on a new and impressive canvas, ?the
Siberia-Assam axis? and all points southeast as far as the Australian
desert. L?vi-Strauss took as his motor of development the forms of marriage
exchange and the logic of exogamy. The ?restricted reciprocity? of
egalitarian bands gave way to the unstable hierarchies of ?generalized
reciprocity? typical of the Highland Burma tribes. The stratified states of
the region turned inwards to endogamy, to the reproduction of class
differences and the negation of social reciprocity.

Jack Goody has tried to lift our profession out of a myopic ethnography
into an engagement with world history that went out of fashion with the
passing of the Victorian founders. Starting with* Production and
Reproduction* (1976), he has produced a score of books over the last three
decades investigating why Sub-Saharan Africa differs so strikingly from the
pre-industrial societies of Europe and Asia, with a later focus on refuting
the West?s claim to being exceptional, especially when compared with Asia
(Hart 2006, 2011).  The common thread of Goody?s compendious work links him
through the Marxist pre-historian Gordon Childe (1954) to Morgan-Engels and
ultimately Rousseau. The key to understanding social forms lies in
production, which for us means machine production. Civilization or human
culture is largely shaped by the means of communication ? once writing, now
an array of mechanized forms. The site of social struggles is property, now
principally conflicts over intellectual property. And his central issue of
reproduction has never been more salient than at a time when the aging
citizens of rich countries depend on the proliferating mass of young people
out there. Kinship needs to be reinvented too.

*David Graeber <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber>: the first 50
years*

Graeber brings his own unique combination of interests and engagements to
renewing this ?anthropology of unequal society?. Who is he? He spent the
1960s as the child of working-class intellectuals and activists in New York
and was a teenager in the 1970s, which turned out to be the hinge decade of
our times, leading to a ?neoliberal? counter-revolution against post-war
social democracy. This decade was framed at one end by the US dollar being
taken off the gold standard in 1971 and at the other by a massive interest
rate increase in 1979 induced by a second oil price hike. The world economy
has been depressed ever since, especially at its western core. Graeber says
that he embraced anarchism at sixteen.

The debt crisis of the 1980s was triggered by irresponsible lending of the
oil surplus by western banks to Third World kleptocrats (Hart 2000:
142-143) and by the new international regime of high interest rates. In
market theory, bad loans are supposed to discipline lenders, but the IMF
and World Bank insisted on every penny of added interest being repaid by
the governments of poor countries. This was also the time when structural
adjustment policies forced those governments to open up their national
economies to the free flow of money and commodities, with terrible
consequences for public welfare programmes and jobs. If the anti-colonial
revolution inspired my generation in the 1960s, Graeber?s internationalism
was shaped by this wholesale looting of the successor states. He took an
active part in demonstrations against this new phase of ?financial
globalization?, a phenomenon now often referred to as the
?alter-globalization movement? (Pleyers 2010), but he and his fellow
activists call it the ?global justice movement?. Its public impact peaked
in the years following the financial crisis of 1997-98 (involving Southeast
Asia, Russia, Brazil and the failure of a US hedge fund, Long-Term Capital
Management), notably through mass mobilizations in Seattle, Genoa and
elsewhere. In the *Debt* book, Graeber claims that they took on the IMF and
won.

David Graeber received a doctorate in anthropology from the University of
Chicago based on ethnographic and historical research on a former slave
village in Madagascar. This was eventually published as a long and
exemplary monograph, *Lost People: Magic and the legacy of slavery in
Madagascar* (Graeber 2007a). The history of the slave trade, colonialism
and the post-colony figure prominently in how he illustrates global
inequality through a focus on debt. Before that, he published a strong
collection of essays on value, *Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value:
The false coin of our own dreams* (Graeber 2001), in which he sought to
relate economic value (especially value as measured impersonally by money)
and the values that shape our subjectivity in society. This hinged on
revisiting both Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, providing the main account in
English of how the latter?s cooperative socialism shaped his famous work on
the gift (Mauss 1925). A theme of both books is the role of magic and money
fetishism in sustaining unequal society.

Politics forms a central strand of Graeber?s work, with four books
published so far and more in the works: *Fragments of an Anarchist
Anthropology* (2004), *Possibilities: Essays on hierarchy, rebellion, and
desire *(2007b), *Direct Action: An ethnography* (2009a) and *Revolutions
in Reverse: **Essays on politics, violence, art, and imagination *(2011c).
These titles reveal a range of political interests that take in violence,
aesthetics and libido. He insists on the ?elective affinity? between
anthropological theory and method and an anarchist programme of resistance,
rebellion and revolution; and this emphasis on ?society against the state?
makes him a worthy successor to Pierre Clastres (1974). Graeber?s academic
career has been fitful, most notoriously when he was ?let go? by Yale
despite his obvious talent and productivity. This fed rumours about the
academic consequences of his political activities. These have led to
numerous brushes with the police, but so far not to prolonged
incarceration, although his inability to find a job in American
universities could be seen as a form of exile.

*Debt: The first 5,000 years* was published in summer 2011 and Graeber
began a year?s sabbatical leave from his teaching job in London by moving
to New York, where he became an ubiquitous presence in the print media,
television and blogs. In August-September he helped form the first New York
City General Assembly which spawned the Occupy Wall Street movement. He has
been credited with being the author of that movement?s slogan, ?We are the
99%?, and helped to give it an anarchist political style. OWS generated a
wave of imitations in the United States and around the world, known
collectively as ?the Occupy movement?, inviting comparison with the ?Arab
Spring? and Madrid?s *Los Indignados* in what seemed then to be a global
uprising. Some shared features of this series of political events, such as
an emphasis on non-violence, consensual decision-making and the avoidance
of sectarian division, evoke Jean-Jacques Rousseau?s idea of the ?general
will?; and it is not wholly fanciful to compare David Graeber?s career so
far with his great predecessor?s.

Graeber and Rousseau both detested the mainstream institutions of the world
they live in and devoted their intellectual efforts to building
revolutionary alternatives. This means not being satisfied with reporting
how the world is, but rather exploring the dialectic linking the actual to
the possible. This in turn implies being willing to mix established genres
of research and writing and to develop new ones. Both are prolific writers
with an accessible prose style aimed at reaching a mass audience. Both
achieved unusual fame for an intellectual and their political practice got
them into trouble. Both suffered intimidation, neglect and exile for their
beliefs. Both attract admiration and loathing in equal measure. Their
originality is incontestable, yet each can at times be silly. There is no
point in considering their relative significance. The personal parallels
that I point to here reinforce my claim that Graeber?s *Debt *book should
be seen as a specific continuation of that ?anthropology of unequal
society? begun by Rousseau two and a half centuries ago.

*Debt: the argument*

Much of the contemporary world revolves round the claims we make on each
other and on things: ownership, obligations, contracts and payment of
taxes, wages, rents, fees etc. David Graeber?s book, *Debt: The first 5,000
years*, aims to illuminate these questions through a focus on debt seen in
very wide historical perspective. It is of course a central issue in global
politics today, at every level of society. Every day sees another example
of a class struggle between debtors and creditors to shape the distribution
of costs after a long credit boom went dramatically bust.

We might be indebted to God, the sovereign or our parents for the gift of
life, but Graeber rightly insists that the social logic of debt is revealed
most clearly when money is involved. He cites approvingly an early
twentieth-century writer who insisted that ?money is debt?. This book of
over 500 pages is rich in argument and knowledge. The notes and references
are compendious, ranging over five millennia of the main Eurasian
civilizations (ancient Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, medieval Europe,
China, India and Islam) and the ethnography of stateless societies in
Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Its twelve chapters are framed by an
introduction to our moral confusion concerning debt and a concluding sketch
of the present rupture in world history that began in the early 1970s.
Graeber?s case is founded on anthropological and historical comparison more
than his grasp of contemporary political economy, although he has plenty to
say in passing about that. There is also a current of populist culture
running through the book and this is reinforced by a prose style aimed at
closing the gap between author and reader that his formidable scholarship
might otherwise open up.

Perhaps this aspect of the book may be illustrated by introducing a recent
short film. Paul Grignon?s *Money as Debt
<http://www.moneyasdebt.net/> *(2006, 47 minutes) ? an underground hit
in activist circles ? seeks to
explain where money comes from. Most of the money in circulation is issued
by banks whenever they make a loan. The real basis of money, the film
claims, is thus our signature whenever we promise to repay a debt. The
banks create that money by a stroke of the pen and the promise is then
bought and sold in increasingly complex ways. The total debt incurred by
government, corporations, small businesses and consumers spirals
continuously upwards since interest must be paid on it all. Although the
general idea is an old one, it has taken on added salience at a time when
the supply of money, which could once plausibly be represented as public
currency in circulation, has been overtaken by the creation of private debt.

The film?s attempt to demystify money is admirable, but its message is
misleading.  Debt and credit are two sides of the same coin, the one
evoking passivity in the face of power, the other individual empowerment.
The origin of money in France and Germany is considered to be debt, whereas
in the United States and Britain it is traditionally conceived of as
credit. Either term alone is loaded, missing the dialectical character of
the relations involved. *Money as Debt* demonizes the banks and interest in
particular, letting the audience off the hook by not showing the active
role most of us play in sustaining the system. Money today is issued by a
dispersed global network of economic institutions of many kinds; and the
norm of economic growth is fed by a widespread desire for self-improvement,
not just by bank interest.

David Graeber offers a lot more than this, of course; but his book also
feeds off popular currents too, which is not surprising given how much time
he spends outside the classroom and his study. His analytical framework is
spelled out in great detail over six chapters. The first two tackle the
origins of money in barter and ?primordial debt? respectively. He shows,
forcefully and elegantly, how implausible the standard liberal origin myth
of money as a medium of exchange is; but he also rejects as a nationalist
myth the main opposing theory that traces money?s origins as a means of
payment and unit of account to state power. In the first case he follows
Polanyi (1944), but by distancing himself from the second, he highlights
the interdependence of states and markets in money?s origins.  A short
chapter shows that money was always both a commodity and a debt-token (?the
two sides of the coin?, Hart 1986), giving rise to a lot of political and
moral contestation, especially in the ancient world. Following Nietzsche,
Graeber argues that money introduced for the first time a measure of the
unequal relations between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. Whereas
Rousseau traced inequality to the invention of property, he locates the
roots of human bondage, slavery, tribute and organized violence in debt
relations. The contradictions of indebtedness, fed by money and markets,
led the first world religions to articulate notions of freedom and
redemption in response to escalating class conflict between creditors and
debtors, often involving calls for debt cancellation.

The author now lays out his positive story to counter the one advanced by
mainstream liberal economics. ?A brief treatise on the moral grounds of
economic relations? makes explicit his critique of the attempt to construct
?the economy? as a sphere separate from society in general. This owes
something to Polanyi?s (1957) universal triad of distributive mechanisms ?
reciprocity, redistribution and market ? here identified as ?everyday
communism?, hierarchy and reciprocity. By the first Graeber means a human
capacity for sharing or ?baseline sociality?; the second is sometimes
confused with the third, since unequal relations are often represented as
an exchange ? you give me your crops in return for not being beaten up. The
difference between hierarchy and reciprocity is that debt is permanent in
the first case, but temporary in the second. The western middle classes
train their children to say please and thank you as a way of limiting the
debt incurred by being given something. All three principles are present
everywhere, but their relative emphasis is coloured by dominant economic
forms. Thus ?communism? is indispensable to modern work practices, but
capitalism is a lousy way of harnessing our human capacity for cooperation.

The next two chapters introduce what is for me the main idea of the book,
the contrast between ?human economies? and those dominated by money and
markets (Graeber prefers to call them ?commercial economies? and sometimes
?capitalism?). First he identifies the independent characteristics of human
economies and then shows what happens when they are forcefully incorporated
into the economic orbit of larger ?civilisations?, including our own. This
is to some extent a great divide theory of history, although, as Mauss
would insist, elements of human economy persist in capitalist societies.
There is a sense in which ?human economies? are a world we have lost, but
might recover after the revolution. Graeber is at pains to point out that
these societies are not necessarily more humane, just that ?they are
economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth,
but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings? (2011:
130). They use money, but mainly as ?social currencies? whose aim is to
maintain relations between people rather than to purchase things.

?In a human economy, each person is unique and of incomparable value,
because each is a unique nexus of relations with others? (Ibid: 158). Yet
their money forms make it possible to treat people as quantitatively
identical in exchange and that requires a measure of violence. Brutality ?
not just conceptual, but physical too ? is omnipresent, more in some cases
than others. Violence is inseparable from money and debt, even in the most
?human? of economies, where ripping people out of their familiar context is
commonplace. This, however, gets taken to another level when they are drawn
into systems like the Atlantic slave trade or the western colonial empires
of yesteryear. The following extended reflection on slavery and freedom ? a
pair that Graeber sees as being driven by a culture of honour and
indebtedness ? culminates in the ultimate contradiction underpinning modern
liberal economics, a worldview that conceives of individuals as being
socially isolated in a way that could only be prepared for by a long
history of enslaving conquered peoples. Since we cannot easily embrace this
account of our own history, it is not surprising that we confuse morality
and power when thinking about debt.

So far, Graeber has relied heavily on anthropological material, especially
from African societies, to illustrate the world that the West transformed,
although his account of money?s origins draws quite heavily on the example
of ancient Mesopotamia. Now he formalizes his theory of money to organize a
compendious review of world history in four stages. These are: the era from
c.3000 BC that saw the first urban civilizations; the ?Axial Age? which he,
rather unusually, dates from 800BC to 600AD; the Middle Ages (600-1450AD);
and the age of ?the great capitalist empires?, from 1450AD to the US
dollar?s symbolic rupture with the gold standard in 1971. As this last date
suggests, the periodization relies heavily on historical oscillations
between broad types of money. Graeber calls these ?credit? and ?bullion?,
that is, money as a virtual measure of personal relations, like IOUs, and
as currency or impersonal things made from precious metals for circulation.

Money started out as a unit of account, administered by institutions such
as temples and banks, as well as states, largely as a way of measuring debt
relations between people. Coinage was introduced in the first millennium as
part of a complex linking warfare, mercenary soldiers, slavery, looting,
mines, trade and the provisioning of armies on the move. Graeber calls this
?the military-coinage-slavery complex? of which Alexander the Great, for
example, was a master. Hence our word, ?soldier?, refers to his pay. The
so-called ?dark ages? offered some relief from this regime and for most of
the medieval period, metal currencies were in very short supply and money
once again took the dominant form of virtual credit. India, China and the
Islamic world are enlisted here to supplement what we know of Europe. But
then the discovery of the new world opened up the phase we are familiar
with from the last half-millennium, when western imperialism revived the
earlier tradition of warfare and slavery lubricated by bullion.

The last four decades are obviously transitional, but the recent rise of
virtual credit money suggests the possibility of another long swing of
history away from the principles that underpinned the world the West made.
It could be a multi-polar world, more like the middle ages than the last
two centuries. It could offer more scope for ?human economies? or at least
?social currencies?. The debt crisis might provoke revolutions and then,
who knows, debt cancellation along the lines of the ancient *jubilee*.
Perhaps the whole institutional complex based on states, money and markets
or capitalism will be replaced by forms of society more directly responsive
to ordinary people and their capacity for ?everyday communism?.

All of this is touched on in the final chapter. But Graeber leaves these
?policy conclusions? deliberately vague. His aim in this book has been to
draw his readers into a vision of human history that runs counter to what
makes their social predicament supposedly inevitable. It is a vision
inspired in part by his profession as an anthropologist, in part by his
political engagement as an activist. Both commitments eschew drawing up
programmes for others to follow. Occupy Wall Street has been criticized for
its failure to enumerate a list of ?demands?. No doubt much the same could
be said of this book; but then readers, including this reviewer, will be
inspired by it in concrete ways to imagine possibilities that its author
could not have envisaged.

*Towards a human economy*

David Graeber and I came up with the term ?human economy? independently
during the last decade (Graeber 2009b, 2011a; Hart 2008, Hart, Laville and
Cattani 2010). The editors of *The Human Economy: A citizen?s
guide*distanced ourselves, in the introduction and our editorial
approach, from
any ?revolutionary? eschatology that suggested society had reached the end
of something and would soon be launched on a quite new trajectory. The idea
of a ?human economy? drew attention to the fact that people do a lot more
for themselves than an exclusive focus on the dominant economic
institutions would suggest. Against a singular notion of the economy as
?capitalism?, we argued that all societies combine a plurality of economic
forms and several of these are distributed across history, even if their
combination is strongly coloured by the dominant economic form in
particular times and places.

For example, in his famous essay on *The Gift* (1925), Marcel Mauss showed
that other economic principles were present in capitalist societies and
that understanding this would provide a sounder basis for building
non-capitalist alternatives than the Bolshevik revolution?s attempt to
break with markets and money entirely. Karl Polanyi too, in his various
writings, insisted that the human economy throughout history combined a
number of mechanisms of which the market was only one. We argued therefore
that the idea of radical transformation of an economy conceived of
monolithically as capitalism into its opposite was an inappropriate way to
approach economic change. We should rather pay attention to the full range
of what people are doing already and build economic initiatives around
giving these a new direction and emphasis, instead of supposing that
economic change has to be reinvented from scratch. Although this looks like
a gradualist approach to economic improvement, its widespread adoption
would have revolutionary consequences.

David Graeber?a anarchist politics inform his economic analysis; and he has
always taken an anti-statist and anti-capitalist position, with markets and
money usually being subsumed under the concept of capitalism. That is, he
sees the future as being based on the opposite of our capitalist states.
The core of his politics is ?direct action? which he has practised and
written about as an ethnographer (Graeber 2009a). In *The Human Economy*,
we argued that people everywhere rely on a wide range of organizations in
their economic lives: markets, nation-states, corporations, cities,
voluntary associations, families, virtual networks, informal economies,
crime. We should be looking for a more progressive mix of these things. We
can?t afford to turn our backs on institutions that have helped humanity
make the transition to modern world society. Large-scale bureaucracies
co-exist with varieties of popular self-organization and we have to make
them work together rather than at cross-purposes, as they often do now.

Graeber also believes, as we have seen, that economic life everywhere is
based on a plural combination of moral principles which take on a different
complexion when organized by dominant forms. Thus, helping each other as
equals is essential to capitalist societies, but capitalism distorts and
marginalizes this human propensity. Yet he appears to expect a radical
rupture with capitalist states fairly soon and this is reflected in a
stages theory of history, with categories to match. At first sight, these
positions (let?s call them ?reform? and ?revolution?) are incompatible, but
recent political developments (the ?Arab Spring? and Occupy movements of
2011, however indeterminate their immediate outcomes) point to the need to
transcend such an opposition.

The gap between our approaches to making the economy human is therefore
narrowing. Even so, there are differences of theory and method that point
to some residual reservations I have about the *Debt* book. The first of
these concerns Graeber?s preference for lumping together states, money,
markets, debt and capitalism, along with violence, war and slavery as their
habitual bedfellows. Money and markets have redemptive qualities that in my
view (Hart 2000) could be put to progressive economic ends in
non-capitalist forms; nor do I imagine that modern institutions such as
states, corporations and bureaucracy will soon die away. Anti-capitalism as
a revolutionary strategy begs the question of the plurality of modern
economic institutions. As Mauss showed (Hart 2007), human economies exist
in the cracks of capitalist societies. David Graeber seems to agree, at
least when it comes to finding ?everyday communism? there and, by refusing
to sanitize ?human economies? in their pristine form, he modifies the
categorical and historical division separating them and commercial
economies. Revolutionary binaries seem to surface at various points in his
book, but an underlying tendency to discern continuity in human economic
practices is just as much a feature of David Graeber?s anthropological
vision.

An argument of *Debt*?s scope hasn?t been made by a professional
anthropologist for the best part of a century, certainly not one with as
much contemporary relevance. The discipline largely abandoned ?conjectural
history? in the twentieth century in order to embrace the narrower local
perspectives afforded by ethnographic fieldwork. Works of broad comparison
such as Wolf?s and Goody?s were the exception to this trend. Inevitably
Graeber?s methods will come under scrutiny, not just from fellow
professionals, but from the general public too. (He tells me that academics
don?t read footnotes any more, but laymen do). To this reader, the first
half of the book ? which relies heavily on ethnographic sources to spell
out the argument ? is more systematic, in terms of both analytical
coherence and documentation, than the second, concerned as it is with
fleshing out his cycles of history. In either case, little attempt is made
to analyse contemporary political economy, although Graeber makes more
explicit reference to this than, for example does Mauss in *The Gift*,
where readers? understanding of capitalist markets is taken for granted.
Nowhere in the book is any reference made to the digital revolution in
communications revolution of our times and its scope to transform
economies, whether human or commercial (Hart 2000, 2005).

Well, that is not quite true, for the author does occasionally introduce
anecdotes based on common or his personal knowledge. The problem is that
many readers who take on trust what he has to say about ancient Mesopotamia
or the Tiv, may find these stories contradicted by their own knowledge. It
is something akin to ?*Time* magazine syndrome?: we accept what *Time* has
to say about the world in general until it impinges on what we know
ourselves and then its credibility dissolves. Thus:

Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican)
computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s,
forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their
laptops in each other?s garages (Graeber 2011: 96).

The veracity of this anecdote has been challenged by numerous Californian
bloggers and the author?s scholarship with it. Graeber is aware of the
pitfalls of making contemporary allusions. In the final chapter (Ibid:
362-3), he cleverly introduces an urban myth he often heard about the gold
stored under the World Trade Centre and then (almost) rehabilitates that
myth using documented sources. Fortunately, David Graeber has not been
deterred by the pedants from crossing the line between academic and general
knowledge in this book and his readers benefit immensely as a result. I
contributed to the publisher?s blurb for this book and said that he is ?the
finest anthropological scholar I know?. I stand by that. The very long
essay he recently published on the divine kingship of the Shilluk (Graeber
2011c) covers the same ground as a number of famous anthropologists from
Frazer onwards, but with an unsurpassed range of scholarship, as well as a
democratic political perspective. Inevitably in a book like this one, the
fact police will catch him out sometimes. But it is a work of immense
erudition and deserves to be celebrated as such.

Our world is still massively unequal and we may be entering a period of war
and revolution comparable to the ?Second Thirty Years War? of 1914-1945
which came after the last time that several decades of financial
imperialism went bust. Capitalism itself sometimes seems today to have
reverted to a norm of rent-seeking that resembles the arbitrary inequality
of the Old Regime more than Victorian industry. The pursuit of economic
democracy is more elusive than ever; yet humanity has also devised
universal means of communication at last adequate to the expression of
universal ideas. Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have leapt at the chance to
make use of this opportunity and several illustrious successors did so in
their own way during the last two centuries. We need an anthropology that
rises to the challenge posed by our common human predicament today. No-one
has done more to meet that challenge than David Graeber, in his work as a
whole, but especially in this book.

*References*

Beteille, Andre   1977   *Inequality among Men*. Blackwell: Oxford.

Childe, V. Gordon   1954   *What Happened in History. *Penguin:
Harmondsworth.

Clastres, Pierre    1989 (1974)    *Society against the state: Essays in
political anthropology.* Zone Books: New York.

Engels, Friedrich   1972 (1884)   *The Origin of the Family, Private
Property, and the State*. Pathfinder: New York.

Goody, Jack   1976   *Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of
the Domestic Domain*. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Graeber, David   2001   *Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The
false coin of our own dreams*. Palgrave: New York.

??    2004    *Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology*. Prickly Paradigm:
Chicago.

??    2007a   *Lost People: Magic and the legacy of slavery in Madagascar*.
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??   2007b   *Possibilities: Essays on hierarchy, rebellion, and desire *.
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??    2009a   *Direct Action: An ethnography.* AK Press: Baltimore MD.

??    2009b   Debt, Violence, and Impersonal Markets: Polanyian
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Great Transformation today*. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 106-132.

??   2011a    *Debt: The first 5,000 years*. Melville House: New York.

??   2011b   The divine kingship of the Shilluk: On violence, utopia, and
the human condition or elements for an archaeology of sovereignty, *Hau:
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??   2011c   *Revolutions in Reverse: **Essays on politics, violence, art,
and imagination*. Autonomedia: New York.

Hann, Chris and K. Hart   2011   *Economic Anthropology: History,
ethnography, critique*. Polity: Cambridge.

Hart, Keith   1986   Heads or tails? Two sides of the coin. *Man *21 (3):
637?56.

??   2000   *The Memory Bank: Money in an unequal world*. Profile: London;
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?? 2005 *The Hit Man?s Dilemma: Or business personal and
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??   2006   Agrarian civilization and world society. In D. Olson and M.
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??   2007   Marcel Mauss: in pursuit of the whole ? a review essay.
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??   2008   The human economy. *ASAonline *1.
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??   2011   Jack Goody?s vision of world history and African development
today (*Jack Goody Lecture 2011*). Halle/Saale: Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology, Department II.

Hart, Keith, J-L. Laville and A. Cattani editors   2010   *The Human
Economy: A citizen?s guide*. Polity: Cambridge.

Kant, Immanuel   2006   *Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View*.
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

L?vi-Strauss, Claude   1969 (1949)   *The Elementary Structures of Kinship*.
Beacon: Boston.

??    1973 (1955) *Tristes Tropiques. *Cape: London*.*

Locke, John   1960 (1690)   *Two Treatises of Government*. Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge.

Marx, Karl   1970 (1867)   *Capital Volume 1*. Lawrence and Wishart: London.

Mauss, Marcel   1990 (1925)  *The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in
archaic societies*. Routledge: London.

Morgan, Lewis H. 1964 (1877) *Ancient Society.* Bellknapp: Cambridge MA.

Pleyers, Geoffrey   2010   *Alter-globalization: Becoming actors in a
global age*. Polity: Cambridge.

Polanyi, Karl   2001 (1944)   *The Great Transformation: The political and
economic origins of our times*. Beacon: Boston.

??   1957   The economy as instituted process. In K. Polanyi, C. Arensberg
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Glencoe IL, 243-269.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques   1984 (1754)   *Discourse on Inequality*. Penguin:
Harmondsworth.

-- 
Prof. Keith Hart
www.thememorybank.co.uk
135 rue du Faubourg Poissonniere
75009 Paris, France
Cell: +33684797365


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