Debt, complexity and the sociological imagination

Abstract

This chapter offers a number of points of orientation for the development of a sociology of debt. It suggests that to date much sociological engagement with debt has been limited by two problems: first, a failure to engage with the long-term and embedded process of the transformation of debt into liquidity and second, an assumption that household and personal debt amounts to illiquid and stagnant households. I outline how such assumptions are compromising the ability of sociologists to identify and engage with how money, debt and finance have become deeply embedded in social life and have become central to the dynamics of social formation. This includes class formation – whose dynamics are increasingly based not on occupations but on the dynamics of financial assets and especially their distribution – and the materialization and dynamics of what I will term here Minskian households, that is, households which exist in a permanent state of speculation.