Analyses different understandings of debt and credit throughout European history in a global context
- Combines a discussion of the multi-layered European and global North-South divide with an effort to retrieve alternatives to the dominant divisive use of debt as staking out claims against another party.
- Explores the consequences of the erasure of historical temporality in the recent period of globalisation" and "individualisation" as well as new registers for political uses of the past under current conditions.
- Draws on socio-political, moral-philosophical and literary-artistic analyses, tracing the genealogy of debt through European history.
Focusing on Europe in a global context to offer critical, historical and philosophical perspectives on debt and guilt
Debt enables individuals and collectives to function and to expand their space of manoeuvre, but it also creates hierarchies and possibilities for domination. By drawing on analyses in political philosophy, political science, sociology, history, social theory and media studies, the essays in this collection discover new and forgotten ways of thinking about debt and North-South relations. They combine a discussion of the European and global North-South divide with an effort to retrieve alternatives to the dominant divisive uses of debt in staking out claims against someone else and as a means of social control.