Sublime

Another way was to broaden the notion of debt, so that all social responsibilities become debts of one sort or another.

It seems to me that this is exactly what the primordial-debt theorists are doing: projecting such a notion backwards. Really, the whole complex of ideas they are talking about—the notion that there is this thing called society, that we have a debt to it, that governments can speak for it, that it can be imagined as a sort of secular god—all of thes

‘Many seasons ago: slavery and its rejection among foragers on the Pacific Coast of North America’

experimenting with self-governance in the streets.

In other words, middle-class etiquette insists that we are all equals, but it does so in a very particular way. On the one hand, it pretends that nobody is giving anybody orders (think here of the burly security guard at the mall who appears before someone walking into a restricted area and says, “Can I help you?”); on the other, it treats every ge

if one gives sufficient social power to a class of people holding even the most outlandish ideas, they will, consciously or not, eventually contrive to produce a world organized in such a way that living in it will, in a thousand subtle ways, reinforce the impression that those ideas are self-evidently true.