Credit and Succession - by Dennis Bouvard

Carl Wennerlind, in his Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720, observes that the emergence of journalism in the wake of the political duopoly of Whigs and Tories resulted from each party seeking to damage credit when the other party was in power. This encapsulates very neatly the core of (what was to become) “liberal democracy”: a constantly broached and deferred civil war waged indirectly by making one’s opponents casualties of the credit now determined by the central bank independently of either party. More directly, though, I think the logic of this development should be applicable to “society” and “culture” in general—and I put “society” and “culture” in scare quotes precisely because speaking in terms of a broader system of debt and credit might make it possible to dispense with such malleable terms—and maybe some others, like morality, ethics, and aesthetics, once everything is reducible to the credit conferred upon each creditor and debtor. Thinking a

Carl Wennerlind, in his Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720, observes that the emergence of journalism in the wake of the political duopoly of Whigs and Tories resulted from each party seeking to damage credit when the other party was in power. This encapsulates very neatly the core of (what was to become) “liberal democracy”: a constantly broached and deferred civil war waged indirectly by making one’s opponents casualties of the credit now determined by the central bank independently of either party. More directly, though, I think the logic of this development s