Bonds is, nevertheless, an eminently readable collection of essays equally deserving of a large audience. Dienst, a former student of Fredric Jameson, is a public intellectual in his own right, but lacks the timely affiliations to propel Bonds onto any best-seller lists.

Neither author maps out a program for future research, but each raises enough questions about the relationship between debt, money, violence, biopolitics, capitalism, space, and the cycles of history to occupy researchers for years to come.ĭebt has already made the rare leap from scholarly manuscript to pop non-fiction – the product of a serendipitous release date and Graeber’s media appointment as the “house theorist of Occupy Wall Street” (Meaney, 2011). Instead of accepting debt and credit as valid “economic judgment of the morality of man” (Marx, 1975, cited in Dienst, 2011: 148), Graeber and Dienst look closely at what exactly debt is, where it comes from, and where it is taking us, in order to “locate precise targets for infidelity to the current order of things” (Dienst, 2011: 157) and to learn which debts are worth keeping and which are not. Both authors, while acknowledging the centrality of debt to human relations, challenge the assumptions, mythologies, and platitudes that make it seem so obvious that one must always pay their debts. The Bonds of Debt by Richard Dienst, and Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, both ask what it ought to mean to live with debt today, and, in Graeber’s case, what it has meant historically. In 2011, as the scramble from above for a status-quo-preserving scheme to deleverage the global economy entered its third year, two books approaching debt from a less lofty angle were released.

David graeber the first 5000 years