Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

AGE OF THE GREAT CAPITALIST EMPIRES 359
specifically, "those who held pieces of the national debt." The more
democratically inclined felt that the entire situation was opprobrious.
"The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt," Thomas Jefferson
wrote, around this same time, "has drenched the earth with blood,
and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating."112 Most
Enlightenment thinkers feared that it promised even worse. Intrinsic to
the new, "modern" notion of impersonal debt, after all, was the possibility
of bankruptcy.111 Bankruptcy, at that time, was indeed something
of a personal apocalypse: it meant prison, the dissolution of one's
estate; for the least fortunate, it meant torture, starvation, and death.
What national bankruptcy would mean, at that point in history, nobody
knew. There were simply no precedents. Yet as nations fought
greater and bloodier wars, and their debts escalated geometrically, default
began to appear unavoidable.114 Abbe Sieyes first put forward his
great scheme for representative government, for instance, primarily as
a way of reforming the national finances, to fend off the inevitable
catastrophe. And when it happened, what would it look like Would
the money become worthless Would military regimes seize power,
regimes across Europe be likewise forced to default and fall like dominos,
plunging the continent into endless barbarism, darkness, and war
Many were already anticipating the prospect of the Terror long before
the revolution itself. 115
It's a strange story because we are used to thinking of the Enlightenment
as the dawn of a unique phase of human optimism, borne on
assumptions that the advance of science and human knowledge would
inevitably make life wiser, safer, and better for everyone--a na"ive faith
said to have peaked in the Fabian socialism of the 189os, only to be
annihilated in the trenches of World War I. In fact, even the Victorians
were haunted by the dangers of degeneration and decline. Most of all,
Victorians shared the near-universal assumption that capitalism itself
would not be around forever. Insurrection seemed imminent. Many
Victorian capitalists operated under the sincere belief that they might,
at any moment, find themselves hanging from trees. In Chicago, for
instance, a friend once took me on a drive down a beautiful old street,
full of mansions from the 187os: the reason, he explained, that it looked
like that, was that most of Chicago's rich industrialists of the time were
so convinced that the revolution was immanent that they collectively
relocated along the road that led to the nearest military base. Almost
none of the great theorists of capitalism, from anywhere on the political
spectrum, from Marx to Weber, to Schumpeter, to von Mises, felt
that capitalism was likely to be around for more than another generation
or two at the most.