David Graeber Is Academia’s Guilty Conscience
The implications of a "Graeberite" academic paradigm would be that the universities ought to forgive their own students’ debts.
David Graeber died this week at the age of 59. The cause is still unclear. This post focuses on what I see as the meaning of Graeber’s intellectual legacy.
Whatever one might think of Graeber’s seminal 2011 work Debt: The First 5000 Years, this book (along with Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century) was the paradigm-defining work in the US intellectual culture of 2011-2014. Following 2014, Graeber’s name became relatively more obscure.
Graeber was known at the time, and still is known, as a political and intellectual anarchist. But, I do not think anarchism is what gave Debt its paradigm-shaping power. This power derived, rather, from the book’s centering of the debtor-creditor societal dynamic, as well as from this examination’s illumination of a host of related concerns (not always explicitly addressed by Graeber) which might be classified as matters of “political economy”: concerns extending from debt and finance to trade, industrialism, and livelihood.
Why debt itself, as the central analytic in this ecosystem of issues? In the US, the Depression-avoiding solution to the 2008 Financial Crash had been massive public taxpayer-funded bailouts for lending institutions—but no bailouts for debtors, i.e. for much of the national population. This solution worked. No New Great Depression happened. Instead, during the subsequent Obama period, we got a long, slow, but consistent recovery (which lasted into the Trump period until the COVID 19 economic disturbance). The solution worked, but was unfair: it was the debtors, and not the creditors, who were made to commit all the major sacrifices to get the economy back to “normalcy.” This extreme asymmetry in economic reconstructive burden drove much of the populist anger manifested in the Occupy Wall Street protests during fall of 2011. This same mass-indignation catapulted Graeber, and his mega-tome about debt, into a kind of short-term intellectual superstardom.
During the early 2010s, Debt: The First 5000 Years helped people in the “debtor” portion of the societal equation (we should understand this “debtor” portion expansively: to include individuals who lacked personal debt, but were politically and morally sympathetic to debtors) to make sense of certain fundamental questions they were beginning to ask themselves about the debtor-creditor relationship’s inner moral dynamic. The societal lopsidedness of the post-crash bailouts reflected a preexisting, creditor-affirming moral scheme, one which increasing numbers of people were now finding hollow. This preexisting creditor-affirming moral scheme says that when debtors take on excessively risky debts which they’re unlikely to pay back, this is immoral of them, and so they deserve no societal help (and, they deserve a lifetime of crippling interest payments as punishment). Whereas, when creditors give out excessively risky loans which are unlikely to be paid back to them, this is not immoral of them—so, they may very well morally deserve the exact kind of societal help which the Wall Street financial and lending institutions received during 2008 and 2009.
Graeber’s book, published a few years after the crash and subsequent bailouts, presented the creditor-debtor moral relationship in an entirely different light, deploying an ambitious interpretation of ancient and modern human economic history, so as to contend, ultimately, that the moral responsibility for a high-risk loan resides primarily with the creditor, and only secondarily (if that) with the debtor. The way Graeber derives this moral argument from historical interpretation is not something I want to get too deeply into here, as I have somewhat different goals in this post. Nor do I want to get into the many scholarly critiques of the book which emerged after its publication. My point here is, rather, that Graeber’s book played a major role in expressing something a large number of people following the crash and its associated creditor-friendly bailouts were feeling at a deep, impassioned, and intuitive level—but a feeling which most such people, especially if they were raised within the conventional American moral schema regarding debt, lacked an intellectual framing for. In other words, such people were searching for a way to translate their emerging inner intuitions, that the old morality had gotten the real nature of things wrong in some profound way, into a new understanding of who owes whom what, when a loan in the thousands, or in the trillions, turns out to be unrepayable. Graeber during this moment became the most important intellectual in the country, if not in the entire anglosphere.
(Note, again, that this stardom was not really due to Graeber’s own anarchist instincts. The inner mechanics of Debt’s argument surely would have been different if Graeber were less of an anarchist and more of a Keynesian liberal like, say, Thomas Piketty, or more of a classical Marxist like David Harvey. However, even with different inner mechanics powering the argument, the social importance of Debt, at that particular moment, would have been largely the same. A readership hungry for an intellectualization of their emerging political intuitions would have latched onto the book in more or less the same way. The success of James C. Scott’s 1998 Seeing Like a State is similar: it was crafted through a set of anarchist instincts, and yet its discourse-shaping power stemmed not from its “anarchism,” but rather from the role it played in helping 90s-era educated progressives express at an intellectual register an emerging set of intuitions regarding a need to mature beyond heavy-handed and reductionist central state planning).
Graeber’s academic career was, by normal standards, reasonably successful: a PhD from the University of Chicago (his dissertation is a historical ethnography about the social nature of magic, set in rural Madagascar); a junior (i.e. tenure-track) professorship at Yale for 8-9 years. Around 2006, he was denied tenure at Yale. This apparently had to do with his work there helping to organize a graduate student union. Graeber had guts. Despite this serious professional setback, Graeber was able to work his way into a professorship post at the University of London. But this post didn’t come until 2013. For six years, Graeber had to bounce among various administrative roles at the University of London, in order to keep his academic career afloat. This is not exactly academic “banishment to the wilderness”, but given the enormous stature of Graeber and his scholarship in the intellectual culture of the early 2010s, it is striking, and revealing, that the structure of academia didn’t have him in a proper, fully-supportive professorship role all along—that, instead, this structure had him bouncing about various precarious positions performing “admin” tasks which were outside of his significant scholarly, theory-making, and discourse-shaping talents. How many more books by Graeber would we have gotten before his death, had Yale, or other universities, invested in him prior to his 2011-13 fame? (that fame being, presumably, part of why the University of London finally transitioned him out of the minor, headache-making admin roles and into the full professorship…and that professorship presumably being what afforded him the time and resources he needed to write Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a work I have yet to read, but should be the subject of a future post).
Why might academia, especially in the U.S., have been undervaluing a figure like Graeber? The intellectual paradigm Graeber was associated with centers creditor-debtor relations, i.e. the morality of debt itself, as a core analytic for all forms of intellectual inquiry, throughout the humanities and social sciences. Well, academia in the US is a debt-fueled industry par excellence. Only the housing industry is more debt reliant:
This may help to explain not only why Yale was uninterested in investing in Graeber’s creditor-critical societal framing, but also why other US universities didn’t grab him the moment he was denied tenure. It may help to explain why he had to leave for Europe, and spend years bouncing around mid-level admin roles, regaining his footing in a totally different system.
More importantly, the graph above may also help to explain why a “Graeberite” debt-centering and political economy-focused intellectual paradigm wound up being rather underdeveloped in the academy of the 2010s. Why did this paradigm not turn out to be the primary theoretical foundation undergirding a generational intellectual reorientation (i.e., among millennials, and in particular among the younger cohort of millennials)? Why did academics who packed their articles and book-chapters during 2011-14 with Graeber and Piketty references find that, by 2016, nobody seemed to care; that it turned out that by the second half of the decade, those references didn’t professionally “count” for very much, and you were at a professional advantage if you’d instead spent the entire OWS era framing your dissertation or articles around the same figures who were valorized during the 90s or early 00s—around, say, Michel Foucault?
(To put this another way: if you were a Foucault- or Butler- or Crenshaw-citing Shakespearean, then there was a home for you somewhere in the American academe of the mid to late 2010s. A Graeber- and Piketty-citing Shakespearean? Not so much. I suspect I could demonstrate this fairly straightforwardly by looking through the Modern Language Association’s job listings over the last decade, though that’s work to set aside for another week.)
My hypothesis about what happened is: an intellectual-paradigm-making industry financed primarily via escalating levels of debt—that is, a “creditor” industry—predictably rejected adopting, as its new intellectual paradigm, a critique of the creditor-debtor moral status quo. After all, the implications of such a paradigm would be that the universities ought to forgive their own students’ debts! And this is why I consider David Graeber to be academia’s “guilty conscience.”
From around 2014 and onward, I began to hear about Graeber less and less. Now, anybody reading this who knows me well might respond, “But Jacob, that’s simply because, between 2014 and 2019, you started doing yearly field trips to Burma and India to research elephants. You just stopped paying attention.” And this might be right, though during those field trips (somewhat to my embarrassment), I did spend an awful lot of time in hotel rooms in Yangon, following various parochial U.S. intellectual debates occurring online. At any rate, a Google Ngram of Graeber’s name suggests a downturn of interest in him came a bit later than I remember: in 2017.
I’m not particularly interested in “proving” in this blog, through data metrics like Ngram, that my impression of recent intellectual history is correct—that a Graeberoid paradigm was indeed emerging but failed to “stick” over the full course of the 2010s. My final intent here is, rather, to put forward the idea that during the mid-2010s, “Graeberism” with its epistemological centering of debt as the key prism through which to understand modern civilization and its crises was intellectually displaced by other kinds of critically-inflected intellectual projects. Furthermore, most of these “displacer” projects had come of age not through the 2008 financial crash and the asymmetrical societal burdens imposed by the solution to the crash, but rather through economic experiences a decade or so earlier, during the economic boom years of the 1990s.
The “displacers” could be grouped under the loose heading of “intersectionality”—although, I do hesitate to use “intersectionality” casually, due to the term’s tendency towards unstable, unreliable meaning-drift. (Some self-described “intersectionalists” may very well be centrally interested in debtor-creditor relations and profoundly preoccupied with the 2008 crisis). Nonetheless, the interwoven intellectual projects frequently associated with the loose framing of “intersectionality” usually do not center the household drowning in mortgage debt, or the 20-something drowning in college tuition debt, as the core subjects or protagonists within the broader social analysis at play. If these themes do come up, the subsequent pivot is not from here to other “political economy” themes such as trade, industrialism, employment, etc., but rather to themes pertaining to identity and identity-based group struggle. The “high-profile” struggles within the intersectional framing are against entities like patriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy, cis-heteronormatity; and the core protagonists or subjects in these struggles are whatever identities have been (according to this hermeneutic) marginalized by those entities.
Usually, the intersectional paradigm casts these struggles as all “anti-capitalist”—and since Graeber himself was “anti-capitalist,” it was possible to persuade oneself in the mid-2010s that Graeberism was actually part of “intersectionality,” or vice-versa, that there was no implicit intellectual conflict (Graeber himself may have believed this at this time). However, the two critical framings cannot coexist seamlessly, because one has so much of its intellectual DNA in the counter-cultural intellectual arc extending from the 1960s through 90s, where matters of cultural struggle gained theoretical priority, while the other came of age through the 2008 economic crisis. In the Venn diagram of struggles and protagonists that the two paradigms are centrally interested in, the zones of overlap are there, but they are small (and too often overstated in size by people whose narrow political or professional priority is in asserting an expedient coalition against some short-term “common enemy,” rather than in getting to a set of genuinely coherent ideas).
A dialectician might say, or hope, that Graeberism became lower-profile over the course of the 2010s because it was “subsumed” within intersectionality, and that the two paradigms constructively cross-pollinated. But, how “constructive” could this process possibly have been, from the debt- and political-economy-focused point of view, especially looking back from the vantage point of fall 2020? In 2011, people were marching in the streets waving signs about debt itself. By the late 2010s, such people had even more debt, with further diminished prospects of repaying that debt, but the signs and slogans now turned increasingly upon the rhetoric and framing—the pivot—of race and gender.
It seems to me that the nascent early-2010s intellectual value system, which centered upon themes like debt and industrialization, was simply cast aside. By the latter part of the decade, certain items in that idea system even became associated with newly-energized “reactionary” intellectual movements. For example, trade and industrial policy (more a Piketty-type theme than a major theme for Graeber) increasingly became a topic associated with “economic nationalists,” and by extension with a flavor of right-wing populism. And, by the late 2010s, religious traditionalist critiques of the creditor-debtor dynamic (i.e., of what some religious traditionalists would call “usury”) gained considerably more discursive traffic than Graeber’s continued late-2010s writings on the subject.
Another important mid-2010s development which is relevant to the short life of Graeber-ism was surely the rise of the Bernie Sanders political movement, which, at least during the first Sanders presidential run in 2015-16, echoed the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests in focusing mass-political indignation at the creditor institutions (“Wall Street”) who never paid any particular moral or material price for their role in causing the 2008 crash. This development was, surely, welcome from Graeber’s own point of view: a kind of “real-world” political vindication (again, I doubt that his “anarchism” prevented him from sympathizing with Sanders despite the latter’s social-democratic, state-affirming worldview). But this energy-drift of “debt-talk,” away from academia and towards real-world party politics (as well as to some non-academic journals with a strong left-wing economic bent, like Jacobin or n+1) had its price. Throughout the “Berniecrat” era of the mid to late 2010s, intersectionality was still well-housed and well-fed inside of the ivory tower. It seems to be more than coincidence that Sanders’ second, less successful presidential run in 2019-20 was much more “intersectional” in its strategic and rhetorical orientation than the ‘16 run. Choices like addressing rural whites a bit less than in 2016, and urban racial minorities a bit more, reflected an intersectional understanding of the uneven demographic landscape of exploitation (electorally, this strategy flopped).
Another factor from Sanders’ point of view: in both election cycles, he needed young, passionate, idealistic people to staff his two campaigns and to energize a surrounding mass-movement. Young people who came of age intellectually during the 2008 crash were likelier to think like Graeber-Pikettyites. But a somewhat younger cohort, which came of age during the mid and late 2010s, was much likelier to think like intersectionalists. That’s partly because the younger cohort was too young when the 2008 crash happened. But it was also because, when they went to college in the 2010s, they were trained to perceive the problems of the world through an intersectional lens. Simply put: that’s the reading material they were assigned. Consider a hypothetical radical, left-wing early-to-mid 20-something in the year 2020, who was 9-14 years old when the financial crash occurred. Consider the likelihood that this young person has ever even heard of Graeber or Piketty—versus, the likelihood that they’ve heard of Foucault, Butler, Crenshaw, etc. Who were their professors assigning: the figures who are implicitly arguing that collecting debt, such as tuition debt, is immoral? Or, the figures who are at least partially providing a kind of moral affirmation of something which late 20th and early 21st century academia is actually already well-set-up to do, and profits from doing, which is to mix together cognitively adaptive representatives of various academically-defined “identities”?
This latter framing, or “displacer” framing as I am calling it (which, yes, may err a bit too far in the direction of being uncharitable), also does something else: while being extremely bound up with a moral metaphysics of guilt, the displacer framing constantly deflects this cosmic “guilt” towards entities, or abstractions, besides the creditor institutions themselves. “Whiteness” has been the highest-profile abstraction like this during 2020, but a few years ago the primary guilt-absorbing abstraction was something more like “toxic masculinity” or “patriarchy.” “Cis-heteronormativity” is sometimes the preferred abstraction. A vaguely defined idea of “colonialism”—which is only selectively connected to the real and morally complex 18th, 19th, and early 20th century history of European colonialism—also sometimes plays this role.
There is, of course, a very strong, non-negligible element of moral truth in these framings of reality; as there is in an intersectional formulation like “debt and whiteness and patriarchy and colonialism are all interconnected and bundled up with each other” (though, isn’t everything in the cosmos “interconnected and bundled up” with everything else?). Yet, I would suggest that the fanatical intensity of these assignments of guilt has been proportional with the creditor institutions’ own increasing intensity of desire to deflect attention away from themselves. The recent embrace of a loosely intersectional worldview both by academia and by the corporate and financial world—that is, by the industries profiting from the vastness of societal debt—ought to be understood in this light.
It sounds like academia, and the corporate and financial worlds are all playing hot potato with the free floating rage and hatred festering in America society (https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdown_relate_t.html). Hopefully it blows up on the financial world's face. Though ideally the bomb-potato should be defused...
This is very good. I'm going to cite it.