Today we seem consumed by thoughts of debt. In the United States there is rampant consumer debt. The increasing reliance of young people on student loans has given rise to fears of unmanageable debt both at the individual level and systemically (there may even be a student loan “bubble”). The national debt is central to the national political and economic conversation, with some politicians making it the key element of their platforms. Of course, concerns about national debt are shared across the globe—leading to financial and diplomatic turmoil and painful austerity measures. At such a time, a book on debt is not just timely but necessary.In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber makes a critical contribution to our thinking about debt. In fact, it reveals to us why we think of debt the way we do and how we might think of it differently. The breadth of his research and the material covered is impressive. While the Western world gets most of the attention, Graeber nevertheless looks at Mesopotamia, China, India, and elsewhere. Historically, he tells a story that runs from before the Axial Age all the way to the present. Across continents and throughout history, Graeber engages a wide array of ideas and arguments.Reviewing Graeber’s work and its reception—even if only partial—is like going down a rabbit hole in an extremely large warren. One article or blog or comment leads to many more. It is hard to imagine very many books in recent memory that have sparked the kind of mini-industry that Graeber’s work has. My point is simply to acknowledge that this review is necessarily limited in scope and I cannot even hope to do justice to all of Graeber’s work or to the extensive secondary literature that is growing around it (and growing at this very minute).In this review, therefore, I will focus on key arguments in the book and a more limited number of reviews that I think are most critical to summarizing his work and assessing its import for contemporary debates in economics, social policy, politics, and more. As you will see, my focus will be on the moral import of the work more so than the geopolitical implications. I also will respond to some of the reviews of the book, many of which tend to focus more on the geopolitical than on the moral dimensions. In the end, I argue that to the degree that the book challenges us to reimagine our moral selves, it is a great success even in spite of any shortcomings in certain elements of the argument.Graeber identifies the central questions of the book as follows: “What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market?” (2011, 13). These questions signal his interest in looking at the moral dimensions of debt and the impact of debt in the way we think about morality. We often talk about the moral imperative to pay our debts, and we also talk about feeling indebted (not monetarily but morally) to others. Graeber wants to separate debt and obligation, however, so that we can better understand their relationship. In the end, he argues, the “difference between a debt and an obligation is that a debt can be precisely quantified. This requires money” (21).Graeber acknowledges that debt is hard to conceptualize—at least very accurately. On the one hand, we can see ourselves in “the Adam Smith mode, as a collection of individuals whose only significant relations are with their own possessions, happily bartering one thing for another for the sake of mutual convenience, with debt almost entirely abolished from the picture” (207). On the other hand, there is “a vision in which debt is everything, the very substance of all human relations—which of course leaves everyone with the uncomfortable sense that human relations are somehow an intrinsically tawdry business, that our very responsibilities to one another are already somehow necessarily based in sin and crime” (207). As Graeber notes, neither of these views is attractive or historically accurate. He seeks a way out of this trap.In moving out of this trap, Graeber provides us with a work that makes at least five important and largely interrelated contributions.These five contributions are worked out in and through the book in a number of areas. But perhaps they are most revealing in Graeber’s treatment of baseline communism and in the role of violence as it pertains to economic issues (particularly debt).Graeber claims that there are three moral principles “on which economic relations can be founded”: communism, hierarchy, and exchange (94). These occur in all societies, though any particular society may lean more toward one than the other. In the United States and other capitalist, developed countries, we are all too familiar with hierarchy and exchange. He wants us to remember the fundamental level of communism, however, the “baseline communism,” that is the foundation of all societies.Graeber defines baseline communism through the Marxist principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” (94). While organizing an entire society on this principle is impossible, it nevertheless is necessary for the effective functioning of any society. We experience it every day in our very ordinary relations with one another. “All of us act like communists a good deal of the time,” Graeber observes, adding that “all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism” (95). Without such communism, we in fact would be reduced to a kind of Hobbesian dystopia of all against all. In short, “communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible” (96).Baseline communism clearly is different from exchange. Exchange “is all about equivalence. It’s a back-and-forth process involving two sides in which each side gives as good as it gets” (103). With baseline communism, I might give more or less to others depending on their abilities and their needs. I also might receive more or less from others depending on my abilities and my needs. The imperative to have everything “even out” between any two individuals is not part of baseline communism.Baseline communism also is different from hierarchy. While baseline communism and exchange both rely on the principle of reciprocity (with the latter, however, focused on a sort of strict equivalence), hierarchy “tends to work by a logic of precedent” (109–10). Here, what one is owed or what one owes depends on one’s place in a hierarchical structure and what has been established in the past as the norm for one’s relation with others. Reciprocity is not relevant, only where one is in the hierarchy and what has been done in the past.Graeber wants us to remember and acknowledge the central role of baseline communism in our society and our economic relations. He wants us to imagine a different basis for our economic life. He also wants us to understand how something like money can change everything. Money turns obligations into debts.Take this example: If I give a ride to a friend (let’s say, Bob) who needs to go to the airport, I can expect something in return at some point. For example, perhaps Bob will give me a ride to the airport when I need one or maybe he will help me move a couch. But there is not a perfectly equivalent reciprocity. Even the ride Bob gives me to the airport is unlikely to be equivalent to the one I give him. Perhaps the ride I gave was during the middle of the day, one in which I did not have to be at work or miss something important with my family. And let’s say that the ride Bob gave me was very early in the morning, and he had to ask his wife to drive the children to school because he had to take me to the airport. Clearly, these examples of friends helping one another are not equivalent. In fact, now that Bob has gone to all that trouble to help me get to the airport I feel obligated to him. The back-and-forth relationship goes on in one way or another. This isn’t a bad thing. It is part of what constitutes my relationship with Bob. I like Bob, and my ongoing relationship of obligation is seen not as a burden but as simply what friends do for one another. However, if Bob calculates the cost of the gas that I use to take him to the airport, figures out the depreciation on my car from the trip, and then pays me that sum of money, there is a certain finality to the transaction and perhaps to the relationship. We are all squared away. He owes nothing to me and I owe nothing to him. At this point, Bob has not fulfilled an obligation, but paid a debt—subsequently reducing (devaluing, so to speak) our relationship to an economic transaction.Graeber shares a bizarre story that illustrates the point even more starkly. The father of nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton presented Ernest with a bill on his twenty-first birthday. The bill was for all the expenses that the father incurred in raising his son, including for the doctor who delivered him. Seton supposedly paid the bill, and then never talked to his father again (92). With the debt paid in full, Seton saw no reason to maintain the relationship (who would want one with a father like that?!).Loans are a way in which we quantify our debts in money over time. Again, return to my example about Bob and the ride to the airport. It might be that Bob is short of cash the day I drive him to the airport. If the relationship and transaction is governed by the principles of money, perhaps we agree to some interest payment that will be due to me when Bob returns and he is able to pay me in full. At that point, the transaction and the relationship are over. As Graeber notes that “a loan implies no ongoing responsibilities on the part of the creditor” (191), and none on the debtor either once the principle and interest are paid in full.Graeber notes that money and lending imply a certain equality. He describes the power of money to bring about a certain “democratization of desire”—since everyone wants the same thing (190). In addition, “a loan does assume a certain formal, legal equality between contractor and contractee. It assumes that they are, at least in some ways on some level, fundamentally the same kind of person” (191). Equality is a good thing, especially juxtaposed to the pernicious effects of hierarchy. But it comes with a cost. Money and lending rip apart my relationship to Bob, and they make the kind of baseline communism central to social relationships all the more difficult. When I see others as agents with whom I have legal and financial debts rather than as neighbors and friends with whom I share a moral universe, then the world becomes a little colder and more barren. In short, “even human relations become a matter of cost-benefit calculation” (319). Indeed, in the new morality that comes to be governed by a morality based on debt as imagined through money, human beings are ripped out of their context and become isolated agents with whom I only have legal and financial debts. Morality becomes my willingness and ability to pay debts with money.This process of ripping humans out of their context (a process of dehumanization) is part of what Graeber defines as violence. Human beings are in complicated webs of relationships in which obligations often are not monetized. Moral obligations help to constitute relationships. The act of ripping humans out of these webs is constitutive of violence and violence is the very means by which the ripping occurs. It is “only by the threat of sticks, ropes, spears, and guns that one can tear people out of those endlessly complicated webs of relationships with others (sisters, friends, rivals …)” (208). But note that the violence does not have to be actualized for it to be effective. The threat alone can be sufficient. The very fact that my creditors perceive me as a mere and isolated debtor (as opposed to a father, co-worker, citizen, etc.) already is an act of violence. In a certain sense, violence occurs every time we make or assert a quantifiable debt, for it pulls the debtor out of a network of more social and moral relations. My creditors also can use the force and violence of the state to compel me to repay my debts. Indeed, if I fail to repay my debts then that force and violence can greatly upset my place in the web of relationships that so defines my very being.It is easy to imagine the destructive power of this kind of debt at the community level. Debt has torn families apart for centuries. Graeber concludes that for the majority of people throughout history, debts represented “the terrifying prospect of one’s sons and daughters being carried off to the homes of repulsive strangers to clean their pots and provide the occasional sexual services, to be subject to every conceivable form of violence and abuse, possibly for years, conceivably forever, as their parents waited, helpless, avoiding eye contact with their neighbors, who knew exactly what was happening to those they were supposed to have been able to protect” (85).Slavery is the best example of the deleterious effects of a money-and-debt economy. Graeber finds it to be a general principle that “to make something saleable in a human economy, one needs to first rip it from its context. That’s what slaves are: people stolen from the community that made them what they are” (146). Indeed, violence is more than the physical abuse that some can inflict on others. Perhaps even more important, it is the power to rip someone from his or her communal context—to make that person socially isolated so that he or she really is no longer even human. It is the power to reduce a person to “something that can be traded” (208). At the most extreme, the slave is dead as a human being and exists only as a nonhuman commodity (168). This violence then is the process “that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable—that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt. Slavery is just the logical end-point, the most extreme form of such disentanglement” (163).We need not go to the extreme of slavery in order to understand the effects of violence on our communities. In his review of Graeber’s work, Aaron Bady hits the nail on the head: When you have to desperately scrabble to get by, by selling as many pigs as possible for just enough money to pay off the landlord, or school fees, or taxes, do you stop thinking of your neighbor as the woman who you’ve known since forever (and expect to know for the rest of your life, and maybe marry off your kids to her kids), and instead start thinking of her as the person who might buy some of your pigs, or might give you a good deal on cloth. When you need to make money off your neighbors, just to get by, you stop offering them unlimited credit (and stop asking for it); instead of helping each other out because you can, you demand cash because you must. (Bady 2012) While this treatment of the neighbor is far from slavery, we may be talking about a difference of degree rather than of kind. The violence certainly is analogous—for the key to both is the disregard of the communal context in which we are who we are, in which we are human beings.The violence associated with debt also can be seen internationally. Graeber connects the dots between American economic hegemony (including the status of the dollar as the reserve currency for the world) and its economic might. The argument is laid out most fully in chapter 12, a part of the book that has received considerable critical attention. As an example, see the reviews and ongoing debate on the website Crooked Timber. While it would be too laborious to recount the details of this debate here, Graeber does provide a wonderful and imaginative description of his basic point: It’s as if a bunch of men are playing poker and one is brandishing a shotgun, and he declares, “I’m dealer. In this game, I’m always dealer. And I say from now on, deuces and threes are wild, but just for me. Is that okay with everyone?” And they all agree. And the guy with the shotgun ends up with most of the chips, and cashes some in to buy an even bigger shotgun, and occasionally points the gun at players he doesn’t like for one reason or another, and even shoots one, though not explicitly because of his objection to the rules of the game (though he was grumbling about them), and the game continues. (Graeber 2012) Here, of course, the dealer is the United States.Much is made about the United States’ debt to other countries. But is it debt or tribute? “What is the difference between a gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you give him a thousand dollars of ‘protection money,’” Graeber asks, “and that same gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you provide him a thousand-dollar ‘loan’?” (7) Graeber’s point, of course, is that U.S. military might is one important reason why the country can so easily and cheaply borrow money from around the world. Indeed, much of the money that is borrowed is used to finance the gun—the massive military—that allows for so much borrowing. While Graeber has taken significant criticism for overplaying the role of military might in the global economic order, his approach nevertheless leads us to ask, What might that global economic order look like if the United States’ military prowess was pulled out of the equation?So, what would Graeber have us do? For anyone looking for a quick and easy solution to our debt problem (not just that we have debt but, more important, how we think about debt), you will not find it in Graeber’s work. One part of the reason is his reticence about being very prescriptive and a commitment to grassroots solutions to problems. Another part of the reason is that he not only recognizes the indeterminacy of the future (something that neither dialectical-determinist Marxists on the left nor end-of-history capitalists on the right tend to acknowledge) but also is humble enough not to go ahead and provide guidelines for that future. He admits that his goal is “not so much to propose a vision of what, precisely, the next age will be like, but to throw open perspectives, enlarge our sense of possibilities; to begin to ask what it would mean to start thinking on a breadth and with a grandeur appropriate to the times” (383).On one matter, however, Graeber seems pretty certain—capitalism is nearing its end. Indeed, there is something quite paradoxical about the future of capitalism—for every time capitalism is considered to be eternal the conditions for its demise are met. “Presented with the prospect of its own eternity, capitalism—or anyway, financial capitalism—simply explodes,” Graeber argues. “Because if there’s no end to it, there’s absolutely no reason not to generate credit—that is, future money—infinitely” (360). It is exactly this infinite creation of credit that leads to the kind of risky behavior that, in 2008, nearly brought the global financial markets to their end (certainly brought them to their knees, to beg governments for bailouts). The problem, then, is increasingly volatile cycles of boom and bust that cannot go on forever. If nothing else, capitalism, with its commitment to ever-expanding growth, is running up against a natural limit. Nature simply cannot sustain the demands that global capitalism is making of it.Given the imminent demise of capitalism, it seems strange to Graeber that theorists posit that we are at the end of history—that there are no more great social/political/economic transformations in our future. “I doubt capitalism itself is sustainable another generation,” Graeber concludes. “I’m not so much worried about the long-term viability of capitalism as the prospect that the next thing they come up with will be even worse. That makes it a very silly time to decide we should no longer be trying to think of something better. What will it look like? How will we get there? Well, I’m working on it. So are millions of others” (Graeber 2012).Any movement forward must begin with a demythologization of capitalism and our economic history—a project that Graeber’s work forwards in a very substantive way. From Adam Smith to the rise of markets and the creation of money, Graeber provides a historical account that rejects the myths at the foundation of our economic life.Any movement forward also requires recognition that the answer to the failings of capitalism is not more capitalism. In the industrialized West from the mid-twentieth century on, the capitalist class at the top of the economic hierarchy struck an important bargain with workers. Through unions, the workers were able to get concessions such as higher hourly wages, health care benefits, and even stock in the companies owned by the capitalist class. The deal was an important truce to the class struggle that threatened to upset or even destroy the system. “If they [the workers] agreed to set aside any fantasies of fundamentally changing the nature of the system,” Graeber writes, “then they would be allowed to keep their unions, enjoy a wide variety of social benefits … and, perhaps most important, through generously funded and ever-expanding public educational institutions, know that their children had a reasonable chance of leaving the working class entirely” (373). Of course, in most of the Western world, the capitalist class and its manipulation of the levers of government destroyed this truce. Unions have been made impotent in many places and even illegal in others. Wages have stagnated or declined. Benefits have been cut. Public higher education has been stripped of funding and turned into primarily a private business enterprise. One wonders what the future holds for even primary school education.Unregulated and nonunionized labor markets generally have hurt workers, and it is little wonder that the middle class in countries like the United States is rapidly disappearing—with a tiny minority moving up the economic ladder but the vast majority plummeting downward (or, at best, desperately clinging to their rung). The idea that more capitalism would solve the problem (throw everyone into the stock and financial markets) has done little to stop the widening of the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”Graeber is critical of neoliberals today, and for good reason, claiming that they are “barely even trying to convince anyone capitalism is a good system any more.” Instead, they are “just arguing that no other system is conceivable” (Graeber 2012). Graeber may not have the system at hand to replace the capitalist system that is failing. But that hardly means that we should resign ourselves to the failing system.Part and parcel of rethinking capitalism is rethinking debt (thus the book)—but particularly rethinking the relationship of economic debt to our fundamental sociality and the obligations that come with it (379). This task requires a re-cognition of the fundamental communism that is the glue of our communities (if we even live in genuine communities anymore). It is in the context of such a re-cognition that Graeber’s call for a Jubilee year (a year in which all debts are forgiven) makes sense. He writes: “It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt. It would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way” (390).It is unclear how serious Graeber is in recommending a Jubilee event. He acknowledges that he does not know what the future will hold. But he knows that we must really rethink our understanding of debt and, consequently, our understanding of what it means to be human. He concludes the book: What is debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence. If freedom (real freedom) is the ability to make friends, then it is also, necessarily, the ability to make real promises. What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point we can’t even say. It’s more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe. (391)Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a good first step.Graeber’s work has drawn the attention of a wide range of scholars, and it has been both praised and strongly criticized. While a full account of all the reviews is impossible here, highlighting just a selected few will provide a good representation of how the book has been received.Mike Beggs is critical of the work for a number of reasons, many of which are shared by other reviewers. He claims that Graeber’s account of the rise of money is simplistic, as is his account of the rise of capitalism. Beggs reduces Graeber’s explanation of the rise of capitalism to the pithy “Evil: the root of all money” (Beggs 2012). For Beggs, the book is a collection of anecdotes filtered through a “populist liberal or even libertarian perspective.” In regard to how Graeber links money to debt, Beggs claims that “this is to make the mistake of reducing something involved in a complicated set of relationships to one or two of its moments.” Beggs also joins with others (see the lengthy and somewhat tedious online discussion at the Crooked Timber website) in his criticism of Graeber’s argument about tribute (that the holding of U.S. debt by foreign countries should be understood primarily as a tribute system that benefits the United States). All together, Beggs finds these shortcomings in the work to be a manifestation of “Graeber’s aversion to economic analysis” (Beggs 2012).Beggs argues that the “answer to bad economics [what Graeber perceives] is good economics, not no economics. We need a genuine political economy.” Beggs certainly is not opposed to good historical work, but he is opposed to the kind of historical work he finds in Graeber’s book. He concludes that “we need the right kind of history, which seeks to explain the evolution of a material system. Stringing together 5,000 years of anecdotes is not enough” (Beggs 2012).Benjamin Kunkel, on the other hand, expresses greater appreciation for Graeber’s anthropological and historical work. He finds that “Graeber’s attention to blood and treasure as the dirty fuels of accumulation is a welcome corrective to recent tales of the pristine birth of capitalism.” At the same time, Kunkel is critical of Graeber’s lack of subtlety in writing about human freedom in light of the manipulations of markets and capitalism. “The blurring here of instruments of coercion and techniques of consent, of armies and advertisements,” Kunkel concludes, “itself reveals the need for a more complex account of the way contemporary capitalism secures—if with diminishing success—the acquiescence of the governed and the punctual remittances of the indebted” (Kunkel 2012).While I lack an economist’s training to assess the merits of some of these criticisms, to the extent that some of the criticisms are generally about a lack of subtlety in regard to the subject matter, that the complexity of certain ideas or institutions are traded away for more simplistic accounts, I probably agree with some of the reviewers. But I think we need to grant that such trading is likely to happen in a work that cuts across so many cultures, time periods, and academic disciplines. While the book seems long (453 pages with notes), it is relatively short given the breadth of the subject matter. It would be impossible to cover this breadth and avoid a simplification here or there. Of course, this may be an argument against even writing a book with such a scope as this one. But in an age in which scholars tend to write increasingly specialized books on very narrow topics, I have to say that the grandeur of Debt is refreshing.For my part, I have two criticisms. Or, really, one criticism and one dissatisfaction. Let me share the criticism first. I think the distinction between debt and obligation in the book is insufficient. In its most simple terms, a debt is an obligation that is quantified. But the relationship between the two ideas certainly is more complex and, even in regard to how we feel about the two terms, is complicated and ambiguous. We often use these terms interchangeably. We often say that we owe a debt to someone or feel indebted, but using the term may or may not entail any money relationship. We sometimes use the word debt simply as a way of saying how greatly obligated we are to someone. Of course, nothing here suggests anything contrary to Graeber’s argument. Indeed, I think his argument about how debt has infiltrated our moral thinking helps to make sense of why we use the word debt in many instances. My point simply is that there is a complexity to the relationship between the two and Graeber occasionally settles for a rather simplified account of it.Now for my dissatisfaction. In the end, I think Graeber’s work can leave us with two suggestions moving forward—either reform (personal transformation) or revolt (socially systemic and structural change). While I think the latter is the more efficacious path, I do not think that the book necessarily rules out the former.The case for reform is this: by rethinking our understanding of debt and what it means to be human, we can live within our current socioeconomic and political system in a way that is more humane. We may even hope to see changes in that system as we begin to treat one another differently. Kunkel notes that Graeber does not reject all large and impersonal structures of the credit system. Some very well may be necessary. Kunkel consequently leans toward reform when he concludes that “assuming that we aren’t about to see a swift unraveling of the contemporary world into a far lower degree of complexity, the left will need to imagine and propose credit systems and monetary authorities that can prise apart debt and hierarchy, exchange and inequality. Money, and therefore debt, is always an abstraction. But justice too can be abstract, and there is no reason in principle why money and debt must serve injustice rather than justice” (Kunkel 2012).The case for revolt is this: until the entire system is overthrown, we cannot hope to see people change in regard to their attitudes and behaviors. The system is so overpowering that people within it will continue to have the same attitudes and behaviors until the system is changed (raising the question, of course, of how people could even think to change the system as long as they are within it). Graeber suggests change is coming whether we want it or not, because capitalism is in its death throes. But certainly he doesn’t want us to simply wait for it to happen. So what should we do? Systemic change also can be heard in Graeber’s advocacy for a Jubilee. But it is hard to know how seriously we should take this suggestion. And, as Jeffery Atik claims, the Jubilee is not even really a challenge to the system. Referring to the biblical text, he notes that “the Jubilee happens every 49 or 50 years. A Jubilee is, at best, an accommodation with debt—it is not the destruction of debt” (Atik 2013).In some ways, the opposition of reform and revolt here is a false dichotomy. It does not have to be one or the other. It can be both. And, most likely, it has to be both. But given limited resources and only so many tactics to pursue, whether to prioritize reform or revolt is a critical issue to resolve. And maybe part of Graeber’s point is to leave this issue open for us to engage. As noted above, he is reticent about providing us with a vision or a program. He offers us some possibilities, but what he seems to really want is for us to become the kind of people who really can imagine possibilities again. As Aaron Bady concludes, “I feel like Graeber has marched me through a hallway filled with doors I never even realized were closed, giving me a quick peek into each one, and then moved on to the next one. And now I want to go back and take another look” (Bady 2012).As Atik writes, Graeber’s Debt is a “grand intellectual project and a call for action” (Atik 2013)—even if that call for action lacks a clear and decisive program. The book undoubtedly will continue to receive a good deal of attention from scholars, and I hope more members of the general public engage with it. For whatever faults it may have (and I am sure it has them), I think it is a powerful critique of our moral vision. Or, I should say, it is a powerful critique of the narrowness of our moral vision—a narrowness that comes from the overpowering effects of markets, money, and debt on our most fundamental moral sensibilities. And if the book does nothing more than challenge that narrow vision, then it already has done a lot. So I agree in the end with Bady when he writes, “You should read this book…. It’s a really fucking good book” (Bady 2012).