Its one of those books that has so shifted my thinking that it feels like the things I learned in it I always knew, but I'll try to write a few of them down.
I think for me, at the place politically that I was when I read it, the most impactful concept in Debt was about how property is a social relationship that often emerges through power/violence relationships. I remember there's a passage where he says something like "It impossible to have a relationship with an inanimate object", where the implication is: if something is "yours", that is a fact about your relationship with other human beings, not a fact about the universe. This idea is a rephrasing of Proudhon's line "Property is theft".
The intro chapter has an anecdote about discussing IMF loan forgiveness which also is an amazing demonstration about how debt relationships often reflect existing power relationships between people, and are used to perpetuate those existing structures.
There's a chapter wherein he describes how in french colonies, the administration convinced the locals to use their currency, having used none before. The method was to impose a debt (through a tax) on the population, payable only in that currency. Then the population will be forced to carry out whatever economic activities get them that currency (such as selling their crops to Frenchmen). This chapter also serves as a counterargument to the right-libertarian/laissez-faire view that states and markets are opposed forces--in fact it is often states which cause markets to exist.
He has a thesis I can't quite recall about why different periods of history are dominated by gold/instrinsically valuable currency vs. forms of IOUs, I can't immediately recall the details. Maybe stability.
I think for me, at the place politically that I was when I read it, the most impactful concept in Debt was about how property is a social relationship that often emerges through power/violence relationships. I remember there's a passage where he says something like "It impossible to have a relationship with an inanimate object", where the implication is: if something is "yours", that is a fact about your relationship with other human beings, not a fact about the universe. This idea is a rephrasing of Proudhon's line "Property is theft".
The intro chapter has an anecdote about discussing IMF loan forgiveness which also is an amazing demonstration about how debt relationships often reflect existing power relationships between people, and are used to perpetuate those existing structures.
There's a chapter wherein he describes how in french colonies, the administration convinced the locals to use their currency, having used none before. The method was to impose a debt (through a tax) on the population, payable only in that currency. Then the population will be forced to carry out whatever economic activities get them that currency (such as selling their crops to Frenchmen). This chapter also serves as a counterargument to the right-libertarian/laissez-faire view that states and markets are opposed forces--in fact it is often states which cause markets to exist.
He has a thesis I can't quite recall about why different periods of history are dominated by gold/instrinsically valuable currency vs. forms of IOUs, I can't immediately recall the details. Maybe stability.
I'm due for a re-read myself sometime soon.