Das Wissen der Schulden. Recht, Kulturtechnik und Alltagserfahrung im liberalen Kapitalismus

Abstract

Summary: The Knowledge of Debt: Law, Media Technique, and EverydayExperience in Liberal Capitalism. Performing an object such as ‚the economy' hinges on practices of formatting knowledge. The article proposes to look at such instituting moments in connection with social conflicts over the legitimate rules of exchange. This is exemplified by way of recounting the story of the codification of Swiss bankruptcy law in 1889. In order to homogenize the legal procedures of debt collection and bankruptcy, two subject categories were instituted: ‚merchants' and ‚non-merchants'. These different categories were thought to account for the diverging temporalities and spaces of credit exchange in everyday economic life. The introduction of the commercial register, a media-technical apparatus, enabled a formal distinction between ‚merchants' and ‚non-merchants'. However, this boundary was contested and proved to be porose. Keywords

Usury and the problem of exchange under capitalism: a late-nineteenth-century debate on economic rationality

“…111 This thesis has been suggestive although contested, and at this point it might be useful to point out different historical nodes at which, by way of intense social conflict, seemingly self-evident spheres like the economy emerged in their objectivity. 112 With regards to the question of economic subjecthood, the last quarter of the nineteenth century saw such a historical node, and the debates on usury contributed to the respective newly-drawn separation of subject and object. One of the conditions that made defining 'object usury' possible was an emerging knowledge complex that combined administration, philanthropy, and social science.…”