Quotes from David Graeber

It is a testimony to the genuine lingering power of leftist ideals that anyone would even consider voting for a party that promoted this sort of thing—because surely, if they do, it's not because they actually think these are good policies, but because these are the only policies anyone who identifies themselves as left-of-center is allowed to set forth.

The reader might be asking: But what does all this have to do with the origins of money? The answer is, surprisingly: everything.

Still, Lincoln went on to insist, what made the United States different from Europe, indeed what made its democracy possible, was

One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let alone in official accounts: that is, the role of war and military power. There's a reason why the wizard has such a strange capacity to create money out of nothing. Behind him, there's a man with a gun.

Kingdoms rise and fall; they also strengthen and weaken; 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. Even until quite recently, many of the world's inhabitants were not quite sure of what country they were citizens, or why it should matter.

We suggested that the really insidious element of Rousseau's legacy is not so much the idea of the 'noble savage' as that of the 'stupid savage'. We may have got over the overt racism of most nineteenth century Europeans, or at least we think we have, bit its not unusual to find even the very sophisticated comtempary thinkers who feel its appropriate to compare 'bands' of hunter gatherers with chimps or baboons than with anyone they'd be likely to meet.

I have dwelt on the Lele in such detail in part because I wanted to convey some sense of why I was using the term "human economy," what life is like inside one, what sort of dramas fill people's days, and how money typically operates in the midst of all this.

For a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can no longer ask Great Questions. Increasingly, it's looking like we have no other choice.

money's capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene. The

The difference, though, was that this time, the bankers were doing it on an inconceivable scale: the total amount of debt they had run up was larger than the combined Gross Domestic Products of every country in the world—and it threw the world into a tailspin and almost destroyed the system itself.

If we really want to understand the origins of the modern world economy, the place to start is not in Europe at all. The real story is of how China abandoned the use of paper money.

Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, so as to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the individual firm, the overall effect of such mechanization is actually to drive the overall rate of profit of all firms down.

The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world?

here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.

The first thing to emphasize is that 'the origin of social inequality' is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning.

Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads.

since Roman times, Europe had been exporting gold and silver to the East: the problem was that Europe had never produced much of anything that Asians wanted to buy, so it was forced to pay in specie for silks, spices, steel, and other imports.

all in all, you're just another jade in the wall').

Horror stories, whether about vampires, ghouls, or flesh-eating zombies, always seem to reflect some aspect of the tellers' own social lives, some terrifying potential, in the way they are accustomed to interact with each other, that they do not wish to acknowledge or confront, but also cannot help but talk about.

Seen one way, a slave-raider is stealing the years of caring labour another society invested to create a work-capable human being.36

We are living in what the Greeks called the ????óÏ' (Kairos) – the right time – for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.' C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1958)

Amerika'daki rejimler hiçbir zaman özel olarak serbest ticaretle ilgilenmemiÅŸtir. Amerikal?lar özellikle uluslararas? yönetim yap?lar? kurmakla daha çok uÄŸraÅŸm??lard?r.

Stateless societies tend also to be without markets.

As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out in describing a similar economy of trust in contemporary Algeria: it's quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor.