This, in turn, motivated reflection on humanity's place in the world, and gave rise to what we know today as the great Axial Age religious and philosophical traditions: particularly Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Greek philosophical rationalism. All this spurred a new sort of debt: the kind that could be abstracted from goods. To support this claim, Graeber argues that the expansionist wars of the Axial period were motivated largely by the need to find new sources of precious metals to plunder a development that came at around the same time as the innovation of coinage systems and the rise of a new professionalized soldier class. Debt was originally a moral and cosmological notion, about our debt to the gods (in India), to our parents (in China), or to the cosmos (in Greece, and sometimes in India). As Graeber shows, debt could not have taken the form that it did during the Axial Age without the appearance of currency, but it was also far from being only, or even principally, an economic matter. The book spans the concept’s evolution from the great Axial Age civilizations-adapting Karl Jaspers's label to describe the period between 800 BCE and 600 CE in Greece, India, and China-into the age of global conquest, and finally though its bizarre mutations over the past forty years.
We may also be entering a moment in which the philosophical and cosmic nature of debt finally becomes apparent.ĭebt’s striking synchronicity with OWS should not overshadow the fact that it’s also a formidable piece of anthropological scholarship. Graeber's book shows that mass movements that result in debt cancellation-whether through revolution or amnesty-are inevitable, and suggests that we may be entering such a period now.
By the time I finished reading it, copycat occupations had sprung up in my adoptive home city (Montreal), my native city (Sacramento), and spots around the world. I received my review copy the day of the October 5th NYPD pepper-spray incident in Zuccotti Park. David Graeber has been much praised of late as a prophet of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and even if one doesn’t want to go that far, his book is remarkably timely.
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