Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T21:47:03.705Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Dependency and Emancipation in the Debt‐Economy: Care‐Ethical Critique of Contractarian Conceptions of the Debtor–Creditor Relation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The fight for emancipation takes place on different levels, and one of them is the level of contemporary financial capitalism as debt‐economy. Debt can be a major tool of control and exploitation in that it produces subordinate subjects situated in exchange relations of debt and credit. Recent work on financial debt and the debt‐economy has, however, not taken gender adequately into account in philosophical definitions of indebted subjects. Gender analysis discloses how the debtor–creditor relationship is based on a contractarian idea of the indebted subject as an autonomous moral agent (Pateman and Mills 2007), and on a masculine, that is, a‐relational understanding of what counts as debt and what does not in the contemporary debt‐economy. In contrast to atomistic notions of the subject in liberal, contractarian theories (deriving from Locke and Hobbes), relational notions of the subject as advanced in care ethics are a better point of departure for capturing the interdependence of subjects within a debt‐economy as a core feature of a nonsustainable monetary system. On the basis of such analysis, care ethics also offers means for imagining ways of emancipation from private and public problem credit in order to make financial systems more sustainable and more just.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 30 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Emancipation , Summer 2015 , pp. 564 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bordo, Susan. 1987. The flight to objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and culture. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Connell, R. W., and Messerschmidt, James W. 2005. Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender and Society 19 (6): 829–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Eva. 2013. Debts Inc. Vienna: Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion GmbH. http://www.schuldengmbh.at (accessed January 28, 2015).Google Scholar
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie Russell, Hochschild, eds. 2002. Global woman: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy. New York: Henry Holt and Company.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 2012. Feminism, capitalism, and the cunning of history: An introduction. FMSH‐WP‐2012‐17, August. http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/72/50/55/PDF/FMSH-WP-2012-17_Fraser1.pdf (accessed January 28, 2015).Google Scholar
Fuentes‐Nieva, Ricardo. 2014. Working for the few: Political capture and economic inequality, 178 Oxfam briefing paper. http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bp-working-for-few-political-capture-economic-inequality-200114-en.pdf (accessed January 28, 2015).Google Scholar
Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a different voice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House.Google Scholar
Karim, Lamia. 2011. Microfinance and its discontents: Women in debt in Bangladesh. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Held, Virginia. 2007. The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hénaff, Marcel. 2010. The price of truth: Gift, money and philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Joseph, Miranda. 2013. Theorizing debt for social change: A review of David Graeber's Debt: The first 5,000 years. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 13 (3): 659–73.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Margrit, Bernard, Lietaer, and John, Rogers. 2012. People money: The promise of regional currencies. Axminster/Devon, UK: Triarchy Press.Google Scholar
Kuttner, Robert. 2013. The debt we shouldn't pay. The New York Review of Books, May 9.Google Scholar
Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2012. The making of the indebted man: An essay on the neoliberal condition. Amsterdam: Semiotext(e) Intervention Series.Google Scholar
Lonergan, Eric. 2009. Money. London: Acumen Publishing.Google Scholar
Mies, Maria. 1999. Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: Women in the international division of labour. London and New York: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Mills, Charles W. 1999. The racial contract. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Nelson, Julie A. 2006. Ethics and international debt: A view from feminist economics. GDAE Working Paper 06‐04. http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/pubs/wp/06-04ethicsdebt.pdf (accessed January 28, 2015).Google Scholar
Noddings, Nel, ed. 2005. Educating citizens for global awareness. New York: Teacher's College Press.Google Scholar
Offe, Klaus. 2013. Europa in der Falle. Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik. January: 68–80.Google Scholar
O'Leary, Fran. 2014. 10 Reasons why debt is a feminist issue. Feminist Times. http://www.feministtimes.com/10-reasons-worry-womens-debt/ (accessed January 28, 2015).Google Scholar
Pateman, Carol, and Charles, Mills. 2007. Contract and domination. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the twenty‐first century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rich, Adrienne. 1986. Notes toward a politics of location. In Blood, bread, and poetry: Selected prose, 1979–1985, ed. Rich, Adrienne. New York: Virago Press.Google Scholar
Sandel, Michael. 2012. What money can't buy: The moral limits of markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Schäfer, Armin, and Wolfgang, Streeck. 2013. Politics in the age of austerity. London: Wiley.Google Scholar
Smith, Anna Marie. 2001. Missing poststructuralism, missing Foucault: Butler and Fraser on capitalism and the regulation of sexuality. Social Text 19 (2): 103–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaughan, Genevieve, ed. 2007. Women and the gift economy. Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education Inc.Google Scholar
Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The problem with work: Feminism, Marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imagninaries. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar