NSmolenskiFan on Nostr: The paper “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Money” contains a detailed ...
The paper “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Money” contains a detailed response to #Graeber’s theory of money.
In a nutshell, my argument is that debt is a moral sentiment that precedes both law and money. In that sense, it is a social universal. However, methods of *reckoning debt* via units of account (which measure *price*, not “value”, as Graeber claims) had to await the invention of money, which emerged bottom-up as media of exchange in standardized commodity forms (what anthropologists have called “repeatable objects”). The state only got in the business of issuing (and in some cases monopolizing) money many millennia after this process had already been underway in human societies around the world.
Graeber, although sometimes identified as an anarchist, subscribed to the state theory of money as articulated by Alfred Knapp and in its current interpretation by the MMT school. His “anarchism” emerges in the implicit utopian political project he calls for in “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”: abolition of both money and state.
In a nutshell, my argument is that debt is a moral sentiment that precedes both law and money. In that sense, it is a social universal. However, methods of *reckoning debt* via units of account (which measure *price*, not “value”, as Graeber claims) had to await the invention of money, which emerged bottom-up as media of exchange in standardized commodity forms (what anthropologists have called “repeatable objects”). The state only got in the business of issuing (and in some cases monopolizing) money many millennia after this process had already been underway in human societies around the world.
Graeber, although sometimes identified as an anarchist, subscribed to the state theory of money as articulated by Alfred Knapp and in its current interpretation by the MMT school. His “anarchism” emerges in the implicit utopian political project he calls for in “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”: abolition of both money and state.