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39 3 Demonizing Debt, Naturalizing Finance Mary Poovey This essay seeks to illuminate several chapters in the history of debt. I am not primarily concerned with tracking the fluctuating totals of monetary debt, whether for nations or individuals. Nor am I primarily interested in the spiritual dimensions of debt. While I will argue that both calculative and theological frameworks figure in the history of debt, their prominence (in absolute terms and relative to each other) properly belongs to the history of the connotations of debt—the historical matrix of interpretive frameworks and meanings by which debt has been understood over time. To recover even a schematic overview of this matrix—as I seek to do in the first section of this essay—is to resist any claim that debt is a natural or inevitable part of the human condition.1 It is also to claim that as the frames by which debt is understood change, so too can debt be transvalued—changed, for example, from an ordinary part of everyday experience to a moral failing to be avoided at all cost, or changed again, from an ethical lapse into a financial opportunity. I begin this schematic history (somewhat arbitrarily, I admit) in the early modern period in western Europe, with an emphasis on Great Britain. While the history of debt could certainly be pursued in earlier periods and different geographical locations, my own expertise makes sixteenth-century England a logical place to start. There are two major transvaluations in my historical narrative. The first, which began to unfold in the late eighteenth century and then reached a point of consolidation in the nineteenth century in Britain and the United States, transformed debt from the ubiquitous feature of everyday life that it was in the period from the sixteenth century through the 40 | Mary Poovey middle of the eighteenth into a personal failing, which could—at least in theory—be avoided. The second—whose origins can be traced to the late seventeenth-century creation of the English national debt but rather suddenly took effect in the United States in the 1920s—transformed debt from an ethical failure, which allowed the past to hold sway over the present, into a positive opportunity, which allowed the present to benefit from anticipated (future) gains. The overlapping trajectories of these two transvaluations , as well as the long period during which each unfolded, call for a more sustained examination of the precise dynamics by which each transformation occurred than I am able to provide here. As a down payment on such detail, I turn in the second part of the paper to two events that helped convert debt from a personal ethical failure into a financial opportunity: the US government marketing of Liberty Bonds in the 1920s and the acceleration of installment buying in that same decade. In my brief conclusion I argue that, as political connotations of debt, which have been animated by the financial crisis of 2008, begin to focus attention on the role that modern governments have played in mediating debt for individuals, a third transvaluation might now be under way. The theoretical framework that undergirds this schematic history assumes that, at any given time, any social behavior (like borrowing) occurs within a matrix of overlapping interpretive frames that establishes the parameters by which such behaviors are typically (or normatively) understood.2 Crucially, such frames are always multiple , and the relationships among them are always subject to change. Indeed, it is the changing nature of the relationships among these overlapping interpretive frames that accounts for both the extended period typically required for significant change to occur in the normative meaning of debt and the tensions among various interpretations that obtain at any given time. Even though this archaeological metaphor might be misleading (because the interpretive frames are not exactly superimposed upon each other), I think of these frames as layers of mediation whose relative (and changing ) prominence shapes the social meaning(s) normatively attributed to the behavior in question. Thus, even though debt is always a social relationship (because it always entails both a borrower and a lender), the meaning of its sociality is not always the same: when the social frame overlaps with a theological frame, as it did in the early modern period, the social connotations of debt carry strong resonances of spiritual obligation and redemption. When the social frame begins to be informed by a legal framework buttressed by natural law theory, as it did in the eighteenth century, then...

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