Why read Debt?

Book cover of Debt

Book description

Now in paperback: David Graeber's “fresh . . . fascinating . . . thought-provoking . . . and exceedingly timely” (Financial Times) history of debt

Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Debt as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Andrew Bowie

Author

I have never found many philosophical accounts of ethics very satisfactory, because they don’t adequately explore how value is rooted in the myriad ways we relate to the world.

Graeber’s book takes a key notion, debt, that connects economics to ethics, in order to try and understand the origins and development of the distortions of human relationships that are characteristic of modern capitalism.

His conclusion that ‘money has no essence. It’s not “really” anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political contention’, which he arrives at through a detailed historical and anthropological…

From Andrew's list on why so much modern philosophy fails to make real sense of the world.