It is difficult in five hundred words to do justice to over five hundred pages (including extensive notes and the bibliography) covering five thousand years of world history. David Graeber must be the planet's most erudite anarchist. This book is not ideally organized, but it is original, highly entertaining, and could hardly be more topical (the author was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011).

The ostensible subject is debt, which in Graeber's analysis is the key to the history of money, economy, and the fate of our species. He sets out to demolish not just the economists' myth that money originates in barter but also the entire tradition of liberal political theory. Drawing instead on anthropological materials but also on philology and an impressive range of historical sources covering the major civilizations of Eurasia, he outlines how money originated as a unit of account in what he terms (following Keith Hart) “human economies.” Its transformation into a medium of commercial exchange was a process driven by violence, slavery, and the repression of women. Graeber moves effortlessly around the world to illustrate the workings of “social currencies,” usually just as they were about to be engulfed by expanding commercial economies. He then traces the history of money as we know it as a long-term oscillation between the principles of bullion and credit money, from the temples of Ancient Mesopotamia down to Richard Nixon's abandonment of gold in 1971. Quite early in this story, money shifted crucially from being a measure of human worth or “honour” to being the supposedly neutral measure of everything that honour was not (p. 188). Concise summaries of sometimes quite arcane literature are leavened throughout the text by humorous asides as well as penetrating insights into larger issues.

This work is intended as a radical's “wake-up” call to the West, an invitation to imagine human communities no longer in thrall to the most reactionary elements of the agrarian civilizations. Graeber's historical syntheses are immensely stimulating, even if experts are likely to chafe. He points out that the influential models of Adam Smith and Karl Marx are “as if” abstractions from the real world. But the same is true of his own historical ideal-types, which frequently flout received opinion. Thus he extends the Axial Age to around 800 AD and portrays it as thoroughly materialist, while “transcendence” is the keynote of the Middle Ages. (It is curious that Graeber retains this terminology, though in general he is determined to avoid European bias.) It seems pedantic to criticise such an author from the angle of parochial academic specializations. Graeber is no more interested in carrying forward a sub-field called “economic anthropology” than he is numismatics or cognitive science. He nonetheless does so, for example by relying on canonical ethnographic work by Paul and Laura Bohannan and Mary Douglas in colonial Africa to illustrate his notion of “social currency.” Some of his main themes, including his quarrel with the economists over the origins of money, were anticipated by Karl Polanyi and extensively debated in the substantivist school and its later offshoots. Graeber is dismissive of Engels (“a stalwart of the Cologne stock exchange”), who he seems to hold solely responsible for a mechanistic perversion of Marx's insights; yet Engels and Morgan were the pioneers of a take on property and patriarchy that anticipates his own. In his footnotes, he acknowledges profuse debts in the human economy of (almost exclusively) Western scholarship, citing among others Moses Finley, Chris Gregory, Philip Grierson, Keith Hart, Michael Hudson, Bernard Malamoud, Alfred Mitchell-Innes, Craig Muldrew, Richard Seaford, and Marc Shell. It seems consistent with his general politics that he acknowledges only individuals and ignores the evolved structures of intellectual enquiry (the bloggers of the Midnight Collective are a partial exception).

A comprehensive critique of Western enlightenment notions of evolutionary progress might be expected to cover a wider range of human societies. Graeber presents a typology of the moral foundations of economic relations (it resembles Polanyi's main “forms of economic integration”), but does not have much to say about those egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies which would seem to leave most space for what he terms “baseline communism.” Graeber would like to expand this sphere in our contemporary societies, but rather than show how this might work he merely points to our customs of politeness as examples of an “everyday communism” that is essential to all social life, even in the neoliberal capitalist economy. Another omission concerns the literature on societies where a concerted effort was made in the course of the twentieth century to establish more humane economic orders. Why was Marxist-Leninist socialism so unsuccessful, “an historical blip,” outperformed and outlived by the hypocrisy and paranoia of capitalism?

We know the anarchist's answer to this. Graeber concludes polemically with an eloquent plea on behalf of the non-industrious poor, a positive example to the rest of us greedy accumulators busy destroying the planet. At this point, not for the first time while reading this book, I found myself thinking of my landlady in a Hungarian village many years ago. She would have begged to differ. A devout Catholic who lived frugally and lost her lands when her family was classified as kulák by communists in the 1950s, she despised debt and associated communists with lazy ne'er-do-wells. In her view, the basis of a moral community could only be respect for property and for work. This view remained hegemonic under socialism, though it has weakened somewhat in the last two decades. She would never have countenanced Graeber's recommendation to revive Hammurabi's practice of debt amnesty. In Graeber's eyes, this Hungarian peasant epitomises the tragedy of our human trajectory since Mesopotamia. But for her part, I am sure that my landlady would politely admire the fruits of David Graeber's own scholarly industry and wish him well with the royalties. So do I. Indeed, despite my quibbles, I feel greatly indebted to this author.