ABSTRACT

David Graeber has several aims in Debt: The First 5,000 Years. At a basic level, he wants to clear up the “profound moral confusion” about what debt actually is by building a definition of debt that is free from “the logic of the marketplace”. He wants to advance the discipline of anthropology by injecting its insights into a discussion usually associated with economic theory and economic history. At the broadest level, Graeber is trying to promote anti-capitalism by means of relevant and serious scholarship without falling back on the outmoded ideas of Karl Marx or the fringes of leftist extremism. Graeber believes capitalism evolved because of a series of events in world history, and is not based on any objective economic truths. One of Debt’s unique contributions is that it combines the various traditions in economic anthropology in an effort to disprove the traditional understanding of economics.