Indebted

As recently as a year ago, the anthropologist David Graeber was well respected within his academic discipline but little-known outside of it. His sole brush with public notoriety had come in 2005, when Yale controversially refused to renew his teaching contract for reasons that Graeber and his supporters linked to his anarchist politics and outspoken activism. When his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years was released in July 2011, there was little to suggest that it had in any way captured the zeitgeist. Within weeks of the book’s release, the debt-ceiling standoff between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans nearly sent the American economy over a cliff and put the national debt at the center of political debate. Within months, the Occupy Wall Street movement had become a media phenomenon, and Graeber had emerged as one of its most prominent leaders and its most important theorist. Almost overnight, Debt was taken up as a manifesto for the moment and a formulation of Occupy’s overall stance—an impression furthered by the book’s most striking political takeaway, its call for a biblical-style Jubilee in which all debts (national as well as personal) would be forgiven. Against this background, readers would be forgiven for picking up Debt expecting a political polemic in the tradition of Howard Zinn or Naomi Klein, writers whose books (whatever their undoubted merits) tend to appeal more to activists than to scholars. To do so, however, would be to underestimate both the ambition and the originality of Graeber’s book. Although its polemical aims are never entirely absent, they are contained in a meticulously researched and wide-ranging work of real theoretical importance. Debt offers both a reconceptualization of the nature of economic relations and a grand theory of history—all interspersed with themes ranging from the socio-historical origins of Axial Age philosophies to the nature of blood-debts among the Lele of the Congo to (fear not) a few good shots at the big banks and the International Monetary Fund. The book’s scope and ambition inevitably mean that it contains both hits and misses. But Debt is frequently successful and fascinating even when unsuccessful. It is worth reading even for those who cannot ultimately sign on to all of its conclusions.