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It is hard to escape the conclusion that this was because an ox was what one offered the gods in sacrifice.
Which were eaten. Soooo barter?
If the king has simply taken over guardianship of that primordial debt we all owe to society for having created us, this provides a very neat explanation for why the government feels it has the right to make us pay taxes.
See your H.L. Mencken quote
If you start from the barter theory of money, you have to resolve the problem of how and why you would come to select one commodity to measure just how much you want each of the other ones. If you start from a credit theory, you are left with the problem I described in the first chapter: how to turn a moral obligation into a specific sum of money, how the mere sense of owing someone else a favor can eventually turn into a system of accounting in which one is able to calculate exactly how many sheep or fish or chunks of silver it would take to repay the debt.
One of the puzzling things about all the theories about the origins of money that we’ve been looking at so far is that they almost completely ignore the evidence of anthropology.
Not really if this represents the approach of anthropologists
Rather than being employed to acquire things, they are mainly used to rearrange relations between people. Above all, to arrange marriages and to settle disputes, particularly those arising from murders or personal injury.
Philip Grierson, who in the ’70s first suggested that money might first have emerged from early legal practice.
established by many Germanic peoples after the destruction of the Roman Empire in the 600s and 700s—Goths, Frisians, Franks, and so on—
Somebody didn't read his history
On the one hand, they make it abundantly clear just how wrong are conventional accounts of Europe around this time “reverting to barter.” Almost all of the Germanic law codes use Roman money to make assessments; penalties for theft, for instance, are almost always followed by demands that the thief not only return the stolen property but pay any outstanding rent (or in the event of stolen money, interest) owing for the amount of time it has been in his possession.
On the other hand, if Joshua’s pig just destroyed Henry’s garden, and especially, if that led to a fight in which Henry lost a toe, and Henry’s family is now hauling Joshua up in front of the village assembly—this is precisely the context where people are most likely to become petty and legalistic and express outrage if they feel they have received one groat less than was their rightful due.
You can't mock hypotheticals and then do this even if it makes sense.
Say the fine is in marten pelts but the culprit’s clan doesn’t have any martens. How many squirrel skins will do? Or pieces of silver jewelry?
Isn't this barter?
all of this we learned from other people, most of them long dead. If we were to imagine what we owe them as a debt, it could only be infinite. The question is: Does it really make sense to think of this as a debt?
Are primordial-debt theorists describing a myth, have they discovered a profound truth of the human condition that has always existed in all societies, and is it simply spelled out particularly clearly in certain ancient texts from India—or are they inventing a myth of their own? Clearly it must be the latter. They are inventing a myth.
Jesus you're tiresome Graeber
we know almost nothing about the people who composed these texts and little about the society that created them.47 We don’t even know if interest-bearing loans existed in Vedic India—which obviously has a bearing on whether priests really saw sacrifice as the payment of interest on a loan we owe to Death.
If we look at other ancient civilizations in which we do know something about the larger context, we find that no such notion of sacrifice as payment is in evidence.49 If we look through the work of ancient theologians, we find that most were familiar with the idea that sacrifice was a way by which human beings could enter into commercial relations with the gods, but that they felt it was patently ridiculous: If the gods already have everything they want, what exactly do humans have to bargain with?
Exchange implies equality. In dealing with cosmic forces, this was simply assumed to be impossible from the start.
The problem here is that in the ancient world free citizens didn’t usually pay taxes.
Thank you finally
Athenian citizens did not pay direct taxes of any sort, though the city did sometimes distribute money to its citizens, a kind of reverse taxation—either directly, as with the proceeds of the Laurium silver mines, and indirectly, through generous fees for jury duty or attending the assembly. Subject cities, however, did have to pay tribute. Even within the Persian Empire, Persians did not have to pay tribute to the Great King, but the inhabitants of conquered provinces did.52 The same was true in Rome, where for a very long time Roman citizens not only paid no taxes but had a right to a share
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Temples centered on the sacred chambers of a god or goddess, represented by a sacred image who was fed and clothed and entertained by priestly servants as if he or she were a living person. Palaces centered on the chambers of an actual live king.
while the river valley of ancient Mesopotamia was extraordinarily fertile and produced huge surpluses of grain and other foodstuffs, and supported enormous numbers of livestock, which in turn supported a vast wool and leather industry, it was almost completely lacking in anything else. Stone, wood, metal, even the silver used as money, all had to be imported. From quite early times, then, Temple administrators developed the habit of advancing goods to local merchants—some of them private, others themselves Temple functionaries—who would then go off and sell it overseas. Interest was just a way
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By c. 2400 BC it already appears to have been common practice on the part of local officials, or wealthy merchants, to advance loans to peasants who were in financial trouble on collateral and begin to appropriate their possessions if they were unable to pay.
The effects were such that they often threatened to rip society apart. If for any reason there was a bad harvest, large proportions of the peasantry would fall into debt peonage; families would be broken up. Before long, lands lay abandoned as indebted farmers fled their homes for fear of repossession and joined semi-nomadic bands on the desert fringes of urban civilization.
What makes the concept of society so deceptive is that we assume the world is organized into a series of compact, modular units called “societies,” and that all people know which one they’re in. Historically, this is very rarely the case.
What is “society” for me? Is it the city where I grew up, the society of international merchants (with its own elaborate codes of conduct) within which I conduct my daily affairs, other speakers of Armenian, Christendom (or maybe just Orthodox Christendom), or the inhabitants of the Mongol empire itself, which stretched from the Mediterranean to Korea?
This only holds if society membership is a zero sum game.
governments may make their presence known in people’s lives quite sporadically, and for many people in history, it was not at all clear whose government they were actually in.
Because it was effectively irrelevant much of the time.
However, if we are born with an infinite debt to all those people who made our existence possible, but there is no natural unit called “society”—then who or what exactly do we really owe it to?
Each other. Duh.
To humanity as a whole. We repay them by generosity to strangers, by maintaining that basic communistic ground of sociality that makes human relations, and hence life, possible.
Set out this way, though, the argument begins to undermine its very premise. These are nothing like commercial debts.
So why are you trying to portray them as such?
If one were looking for the ethos for an individualistic society such as our own, one way to do it might well be to say: we all owe an infinite debt to humanity, society, nature, or the cosmos (however one prefers to frame it), but no one else could possibly tell us how we are to pay it.
Literally this is the core argument of human history.
If so, it would actually be possible to see almost all systems of established authority—religion, morality, politics, economics, and the criminal-justice system
Academia notably missing.
After all, when Americans speak of paying their debt to society, they are not thinking of their responsibilities to people who live in Sweden, or Gabon.
That would be the world. Semantics again.
At one point someone asks an imaginary Priest of Positivism what he thinks of the notion of human rights. The priest scoffs at the idea. This is nonsense, he says, an error born of individualism. Positivism understands only duties.
That fundamentally misunderstands rights. Each right has an obligation. If I have free speech I am obligated not to impinge the speech of others. That's not a debt. That's just basic day to day functioning.
While Comte doesn’t use the word “debt,” the sense is clear enough.
Semantics matter until they don't? Really?
All religions, for Durkheim, are simply ways of recognizing our mutual dependence on one another, a dependence that affects us in a million ways that we are never entirely aware of. “God” and “society” are ultimately the same.
The problem is that for several hundred years now, it has simply been assumed that the guardian of that debt we owe for all of this, the legitimate representatives of that amorphous social totality that has allowed us to become individuals, must necessarily be the state.
Only because we created the state. Cart before the horse.
This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don’t owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay.
States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.
You haven't proved this. And you contradict yourself in the last line.
Credit money is based on trust, and in competitive markets, trust itself becomes a scarce commodity. This is particularly true of dealings between strangers.
Ancient coins invariably circulated at a value higher than their metal content.2 This was largely because Tiberius’s government was willing to accept them at face value. However, the Persian government probably wasn’t, and the Mauryan and Chinese governments definitely would not.
Within a community—a town, a city, a guild or religious society—pretty much anything could function as money, provided everyone knew there was someone willing to accept it to cancel out a debt.
in certain cities in nineteenth-century Siam, small change consisted entirely of porcelain Chinese gaming counters—basically, the equivalent of poker chips—issued by local casinos. If one of these casinos went out of business or lost its license, its owners would have to send a crier through the streets banging a gong and announcing that anyone holding such chits had three days to redeem them.
In a similar way, English shops, for many centuries, would issue their own wood or lead or leather token money. The practice was often technically illegal, but it continued until relatively recent times.
As such, they might circulate broadly, at least among anyone who did regular business at that shop. But they were unlikely to travel very far from Stony Stratford—most tokens, in fact, never circulated more than a few blocks in any direction.
Throughout most of history, even where we do find elaborate markets, we also find a complex jumble of different sorts of currency. Some of these may have originally emerged from barter between foreigners: the cacao money of Mesoamerica or salt money of Ethiopia are frequently cited examples.5
One could often learn a lot about the balance of political forces in a given time and place by what sorts of things were acceptable as currency. For instance: in much the same way that colonial Virginia planters managed to pass a law obliging shopkeepers to accept their tobacco as currency, medieval Pomeranian peasants appear to have at certain points convinced their rulers to make taxes, fees, and customs duties, which were registered in Roman currency, payable in wine, cheese, peppers, chickens, eggs, and even herring—much to the annoyance of traveling merchants, who therefore had to either
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So barter was inconvenient? And replacing it with tokens ended an annoyance?
Thus money is almost always something hovering between a commodity and a debt-token.
In other words, the battle between state and market, between governments and merchants, is not inherent to the human condition.
Struggling to prove this.
Unlike with Smith, however, it never occurred to Nietzsche that you could have a world where all such transactions immediately cancel out. Any system of commercial accounting, he assumed, will produce creditors and debtors. In fact, he believed that it was from this very fact that human morality emerged.
Needless to say, he doesn’t provide a scintilla of evidence for this (none exists).10 But to ask for evidence would be to miss the point.
Convenient.
When humans did begin to form communities, Nietzsche continues, they necessarily began to imagine their relationship to the community in these terms. The tribe provides them with peace and security. They are therefore in its debt.
Again do the people in societies tribes etc. ACTUALLY see it this way? Or is a Western view imposed on them?
On the one hand, it is because of our feeling of debt to the ancestors that we obey the ancestral laws:
Or maybe the thing just works and people like the results. Tradition doesn't stop modern laws from changing.
