Quotes About History

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

One of the most striking patterns we discovered while researching this book – indeed, one of the patterns that felt most like a genuine breakthrough to us – was how, time and again in human history, that zone of ritual play has also acted as a site of social experimentation – even, in some ways, as an encyclopaedia of social possibilities.

No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.

To be fair, they don't deny that human beings are quirky and imaginative creatures - they just seem to reason that, in the long run, this fact makes very little difference. Those who don't follow an optimal pathway for the use of resources are destined for the ash heap of history.

Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce

most medieval governments threatened extremely harsh penalties on bankers unable to make restitution in such cases: as witnessed by the example of Francesch Castello, beheaded in front of his own bank in Barcelona in 1360.76

But it's crucial that we set the process in motion. One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent 'big picture' of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts. But to begin making sense of the new information that's now before our eyes, it is not enough to compile and sift vast quantities of data. A conceptual shift is also required.

Paper money was debt money, and debt money was war money, and this has always remained the case.

The "self-actualization" philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will.

In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of accidental byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money.

One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent 'big picture' of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts.

At the time of the American Revolution, the terms 'left' and 'right' themselves did not yet exist. A product of the decade immediately following, they originally referred to the respective seating positions of aristocratic and popular factions in the French National Assembly of 1789.

History, in Renaissance Europe of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, was not a story of progress.

There are, certainly, tendencies in history. Some are powerful; currents so strong that they are very difficult to swim against (though there always seem to be some who manage to do it anyway). But the only 'laws' are those we make up ourselves. Which brings us on to our second objection.

Modern bankac?l?k sistemleri de ilk önce savaÅŸlar? finanse etmek üzere oluÅŸturulmuÅŸtur.

If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away.

If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies.

If it is possible to have monarchs, aristocracies, slavery and extreme forms of patriarchal domination, even without a state (as it evidently was); and if it's equally possible to maintain complex irrigation systems, or develop science and abstract philosophy without a state (as it also appears to be), then what do we actually learn about human history by establishing that one political entity is what we would like to describe as a 'state' and another isn't?

The ultimate question of human history, as we'll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.

The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing."16

In reality, there's every reason to believe that farming 'reached' California just as soon as it reached anywhere else in North America. It's just that (despite a work ethic that valorized strenuous labour, and a regional exchange system that would have allowed information about innovations to spread rapidly) people there rejected the practice as definitively as they did slavery.

Let us emphasize (we really shouldn't have to) that Rousseau's effusions on the fundamental decency of human nature and lost ages of freedom and equality were in no sense themselves responsible for the French Revolution.

In fact, the earliest word for 'freedom' recorded in any human language is the Sumerian term ama(r)-gi, which literally means 'return to mother' - because Sumerian kings would periodically issue decrees of debt freedom, cancelling all non-commercial debts and in some cases allowing those held as debt peons in their creditors' households to return home to their kin.

Throughout most of history, when overt political conflict between classes did appear, it took the form of pleas for debt cancellation—the freeing of those in bondage and, usually, a more just reallocation of the land.