To tell the history of debt, then, is also necessarily to reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to pervade every aspect of human life - even to provide the terminology for the moral and religious voices ostensibly raised against it.David Graeber
The moral ground of our most basic social relationships is constantly being brought into being.David Graeber
If human beings are the political animal, it is because we are the imaginative animal.David Graeber
It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.David Graeber
Debt, then, is just an extreme and particularly vicious example of processes that always tend to take place in any system of property rights.David Graeber
A debt, then, is just an exchange that has not been brought to completion.David Graeber
The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.David Graeber
What, precisely, did it mean to say that one had a debt? This is a moral question.David Graeber
The debtor/creditor relation is at the very core of the human experience.David Graeber
Economics, as it presents itself to the world today, is really the description of the way capitalism works.David Graeber
One can no more invent money than one can invent oneself.David Graeber
Much of the confusion in contemporary debates about debt arises from the fact that we are still stuck with the pieces of exploded theories, which we have never properly sorted out or picked through.David Graeber
Communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible.David Graeber
Could it be that capitalism, with its endless emphasis on individual responsibility, is actually just the political form of a much deeper, perennial problem?David Graeber
To historically reconstruct the history of debt is also to reconstruct the history of the human imagination.David Graeber