Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

404 NOTES
brother charges another" (op cit). In ancient
Greece, friendly loans between social
equals were known as eranos loans,
usually of sums raised by an impromptu
mutual-aid society and not involving the
payment of interest (Jones 1956:171-73;
Vondeling 19 6 1; Finley 1981:67-68; Millet
1991:153-155). Aristocrats often made such
loans to one another, but so did groups of
slaves trying to pool money to buy back
their freedom (Harrill 1998:167). This tendency,
for mutual aid to be most marked
at the very top and very bottom of the
social scale is a consistent pattern to this
day.
31. Hence the constant invocation of
the phrase "your brother," particularly in
Deuteronomy, e.g., "you shall not lend at
interest to your brother" (23:20).
Chapter Five
LAs we'll see in chapter seven, Plato
begins The Republic in exactly the same
way.
2. For a polite but devastating assessment,
see Kahneman 2003.
3· Homans 1958, also Blau 1964; Levi­
Strauss 1963:296. In anthropology, the
first to propose reciprocity as a universal
principle was Richard Thurnwald (1916),
but it was made famous by Malinowski
(1922) .
4· One reason no known law code has
ever been known to enforce the principle;
the penalty was always there to be commuted
to something else.
5· Atwood (20o8:1). The author then
proceeds to explore the nature of our
sense of economic morality by comparing
the behavior of caged apes with middleclass
Canadian children to argue that
all human relations are indeed either exchange
or forcible appropriation (ibid:49).
Despite the brilliance of many of its arguments,
the result is a rather sad testimony
to how difficult it is for the scions of the
North Atlantic professional classes not to
see their own characteristic ways of imagining
the world as simple human nature.
6. Seton's father, a failed shipping magnate
turned accountant, was, Seton later
wrote, so cold and abusive that his son
spent much of his youth in the woods trying
to avoid him; after paying the debtwhich
incidentally came to $537.50, a tidy
but not insurmountable sum in 1881-he
changed his name and spent much of the
rest of his life trying to develop more
healthy child-rearing techniques.
7· Rev. W.H. Beatley m Levy-Bruhl
1923:411
8. Rev. Fr. Bulli:on, m Levy-Bruhl
1923:425
9· This phrase was not coined by
Marx, incidentally, but was apparently a
slogan current in the early French workers'
movement, first appearing in print
in the work of socialist Louis Blanc in
1839. Marx only took up the phrase in
his Critique of the Gotha Programme in
1875, and even then used it in a rather idiosyncratic
way: for the principle he imagined
could apply on the level of society
as a whole once technology had reached
the point of guaranteeing absolute material
abundance. For Marx, "communism"
was both the political movement aiming
to bring about such a future society, and
that society itself. I am drawing here more
on the alternate strain of revolutionary
theory, evident most famously perhaps in
Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid (1902).
10. At least, unless there is some specific
reason not to--for instance, a hierarchical
division of labor that says some
people get coffee and others do not.
11. What this means of course is that
command economies-putting government
bureaucracies in charge of coordinating
every aspect of the production and
distribution of goods and services within
a given national territory-tends to be
much less efficient than other available alternatives.
This is obviously true, though
if it "just doesn't work" at all, it's hard to
imagine how states like the Soviet Union
could have existed, let alone maintain