There's really no nicer way to say this.” “The reason that people were ready for such a conversation was that the story everyone had been told for the last decade or so had just been revealed to be a colossal lie. Is that really true? And in the light of the 2008 financial crisis, this question has been asked many times - even if the conversation everyone was expecting has never really taken place: Graeber relates a story how he got confused by a statement in a discussion about the IMF and the World Bank. The effects of this transition may become more understandable in this big picture.Ĭhapter 1: On the Experience of Moral Confusion This history of ages seems to be cyclic and in fact, we entered a new age in the last decades. Then, it provides a compelling history of four known and very long world-stretching ages of markets and money (Chapters 8 through 12). Graeber finds a deep tie in the anthropological evidence between debt and violence and dishonor and reminds us that being in debt is a social construction (much more than a mathematical fact) and thus can mean different things.
The book first looks for the foundations of money and debt, both in human morality and culture (Chapters 2 through 7).
I do not make any claim to completeness or having picked all the cherries. Sometimes I summarized the gist of an idea, sometimes I simply cited important or well-written paragraphs that capture the gist well by themselves. Instead, I provide here the shortest summary I can come up with in three minutes and then leave the reader with a chronological collection of notes I made while reading. I decided therefore to write neither a review nor a complete summary. In fact, I only got a feeling of the big picture of Graebers line of thought by compiling this post. It is so full of anthropological evidence as well as Graebers own interpretation of circumstances that it is not easy to keep all of them in mind, much less to make out the big picture that Graeber wants to paint. I found a lot of things to think about in here and very much enjoyed reading it. This book has a lot of insight to offer about the background on which we should lead current discussions about debt and money.
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