Tag: Graeber

David Graeber’s ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Year‘ is easily the most thought-provoking, insightful, erudite and provocative book I have read over the last few years. While you can disagree with particular arguments or resist certain conclusions, it will shake your most fundamental assumptions about social life. After reading the book, you will never see money, credit, war, debt, slavery, states, religion, capitalism, finance, economics, anthropology, presents, hierarchy, and history in the same way again. Don’t be fooled by the title (and the horrendous cover) – this book is nothing less than a reconstruction of world history in the grand traditions of Toynbee, Spengler, Jaspers, and Braudel. Debt plays center stage but one learns just as much about the genesis of the state, the origin of money, the history of slavery and the meaning of gifts. The approach of the book not only spans history, anthropology, social science and philosophy but switches effortlessly between the empirical and the normative, the theoretical and the metaphysical. Which is actually, my major problem with the book. The prose is so convincing and the erudition of the author so deep that one has to be constantly on the alert to separate the evidence from the opinion, the analysis from the speculation, the social critique from the dispassionate search for scientific truth (I suspect Graeber wouldn’t really agree that these can be separated anyways). Personally, I found the demolition with the help of anthropological evidence of the ‘foundational myth of the discipline of economics’ – the…