Rechtstrieb

Can a defaulter who did not breach any formal legal liability yet be blamed on a moral level? Vice versa: Should someone who behaved impeccably but nevertheless got into financial trouble not be freed from any legal responsibility? Unfortunately, the English language does not provide for an equivalent to the polysemous German notion of ‘Schuld’, which entails economic, legal and moral implications all at once. Both questions, however, run through Mischa Suter’s fascinating book as constant guiding lines (see p. 61). Through the prism of the ‘Rechtstrieb’, the Swiss notion for the foreclosure of debts, the author convincingly demonstrates that ‘capitalism’—even in its liberal heydays—has always been an ‘uneven’ (p. 25) phenomenon, which did never follow a single monocausal logic. In this respect, the study also contributes to a new consensus, which has emerged in recent years, tending to blur the supposed dividing line between ‘pre-modern’ and ‘modern’ economies. The book, result of a dissertation at the University of Zurich in 2014, concentrates on daily practices, which were in use in the various cantons of nineteenth-century Switzerland to regulate financial liabilities among ordinary people.

Capitalism · Debt · Economics · Epistemology · German · Law and economics · Liability · Phenomenon · Political science · Prism · Sociology · Theology · Usury · Economic and Social Issues · Finance · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism

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