With debt at the heart of revolts and palace coups throughout the ancient world, the world’s great religions felt compelled to weigh in. Morality, they held, had to be based on something higher than paying one’s debts to society. The Lord’s Prayer, Graeber reminds us, could just as well read “forgive us our debts, just as we forgive our debtors” — and Christ was called a “Redeemer.” But at the same time, religions used a logic of their own to speak of the immeasurable debts we owe to God or the cosmos, and savvy monarchs used that vocabulary to entrench their own power. In many languages, the word “debt” is the same as “sin” (in some cases the interest could be paid in sacrifices, but the principal was always one’s life).

The traditional understanding of debt as moral obligation changed radically in the 17th century, according to Graeber, when people started to see themselves as independent contractors who could rent out their services to fellow citizens. Individuals now faced one another as equals, and the language of the feudal household — “please” (as in “if you please, My Lord”) and “thank you” (which derives from “think,” as in “I will think on it” or remember) — lost its deferential connotations and entered everyday life. But there was a dark side to these developments. “Those who have argued that we are the natural owners of our rights and liberties,” Graeber writes, “have been mainly interested in asserting that we should be free to give them away, or even to sell them.” Although “mainly” is a bit tendentious, Graeber’s point is that we ended up enslaving ourselves by thinking of ourselves as fully autonomous. As anyone who works a 9-to-5 job knows, the “right” to sell one’s labor hardly feels like privilege.

So what, then, is to be done? Graeber finds reasons for hope in some unexpected places: corporations where elite management teams often operate more communistically than communes; in the possibility of a Babylonian-style Jubilee for Third World nations and students saddled with government loans; and from his own study of the Malagasy people of Madagascar, who he claims were adept at evading the snares of consumer debt encouraged by the state. But there is a sizable gulf between Graeber’s anthropological insights and his utopian political prescriptions. “Debt” ends with a paean to the “non-industrious poor.” “Insofar as the time they are taking off from work is being spent . . . enjoying and caring for those they love,” Graeber writes, they are the “pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one’s penchant for self-destruction.”

It’s an old dream among anthropologists — one that goes back to Rousseau. In 1968, Graeber’s own teacher, Marshall Sahlins, wrote an essay, “The Original Affluent Society,” which maintained that the hunters and gatherers of the Paleolithic period rejected the “Neolithic Great Leap Forward” because they correctly saw that the advancements it promised in tool-making and agriculture would reduce their leisure time. Graeber approves. He thinks it’s a mistake when unions ask for higher wages when they should go back to picketing for fewer working hours.