par Bruno THERET
The symbolic representation of primordial debt, insofar as it has its basis in the relationship between human beings and death, is a human institution of the same anthropological status as the prohibition of incest. Since there is no society in which human beings are immortal, the debt of life structures necessarily every society, which does not imply, however, that it takes an identical form and is thought of as such everywhere. Therefore, it is still at the core of modern societies, and what differentiates them from savage and archaic societies is only the social forms it takes and the means by which it is settled.
So, in modern capitalist societies, despite the invisibilization of life debt by the prevailing economic ideology which imagines a rational, immortal and asexual individual, and considers purely contractual private debts, it nonetheless persists under the form of a social debt of existence linking individuals together within a “society”. This social debt, as we are now going to show more precisely, is a credit/debt represented, on the debt side, both by taxation (an obligation of all the citizens vis-à-vis the State) and social contributions to social security organizations (life-long mutual obligations between citizens), and, on the credit side, by their counterparts, public services and social benefits (the social rights of every citizen).
The new meaning of life debt in statist-capitalist societies
One specificity of modern – capitalist and statist – societies is that they are less segmented than differentiated into several autonomous orders of transactions (whose functioning principles are logically contradictory but dependent one another): for instance, the market economic order of bargaining transactions; the state political order of rationing-redistribution transactions; the domestic order of gift transactions. This process of differentiation has developed on the basis of the invention by merchants of a new type of contractual commercial debts, which have been “authorized” by law or ethics (J. R. Commons), which are horizontal (between formal equals), releasable and transferable; these debts are created on occasion of market transactions, that is to say of exchanges of goods and services through which the property rights over them are transferred. Correlatively, the debt of life has lost its transcendental character and has taken the forms of social and fiscal debts that express the social and political self-protection of the society as a community of payment of these debts.
Consequently, there has been a double reversal of the meanings of life debt and sovereignty in capitalism:
1/The reversal of the relationship of sovereignty by the bourgeois revolution according to the new philosophical idea of People’s sovereignty, based on natural law instead of divine law; hence the reversal of the power relation in the life debt relationship, sovereign powers being no more creditors but debtors vis-à-vis the People, now the sovereign authority, and the conception of sovereign debt as a life debt that the State owes to the People[20]. Hence too the invention of the social debt, that is of a representation of society as a community of citizens indebted to itself.
2/The reversal of the relationship to time in debt relations that goes with the impetuous growth of releasable debts (contractual debts) compared to unreleasable debts (tutelary debts); contractual debts are promises to pay in the future: the causality in their valuation is from the imagined future towards the present; to the contrary, tutelary debts are inherited from the past: for them this causality is from the imagined past to the present.
One can then consider that the modern form of “vertical” life debts (between human beings and the immortal supra-human authorities that are now nations and/or peoples) corresponds to the sovereign debt of protection that the state owes to the people and is funded by taxes in accordance to the polanyian principle of redistribution or the commonsian rationing transaction: for instance, free distribution of public health care and other public services, welfare allowances, etc., that are characteristics of the ideal-type of the universal “beveridgian” welfare state and individualist liberal democracy.
As for the modern form of “diagonal” life debts between human groups reproducing and exchanging life capital, it corresponds to the social debt of protection funded by social security contributions and based on the polanyian principle of reciprocity or the maussian principle of gift: for instance, health insurance, unemployment insurance, and pensions funded by social contributions (pay-as-you-go systems), etc. that are characteristics of the ideal-type of the “bismarckian” fragmented and federative social state and solidarist social democracy.
But these two ideal-types of life debt recognition in contemporary societies are usually combined in the specific hybridizations of reciprocity and redistribution that are characteristic of concrete national systems of social protection (Théret 2011). There are then two meanings of social debt to reconcile[21]: the social debt as an ideal symbolic representation of the debt of solidarity that democratic societies owes to themselves; and the social debt as the real set of fiscal and mutualist monetary payments honoring the vertical and diagonal life debts owed to the citizens by the powers to which rights of sovereignty have been delegated by the people.
In other words, in a democratic state based on the sovereign authority of a people sharing common belonging values, the vertical life debt takes the form of a “fiscal” or “state’s debt” which is the state’s duty to protect the people who has delegated its sovereignty to it. This is the sovereign (life) debt, made up of social entitlements to individuals honored under the form of state public spending on health, education, security, amenities, etc., and which is offset by taxation or quasi-taxation. As for the diagonal mutualist life debt, it is a social debt characterized by the fact that the community of debtors merges with that of creditors, each member of a sovereign community of values being both creditor of social benefits and debtor of social contributions, so that, even if the total amount of assets of social protection increases with the size of the population and the quality of its protection, this social credit/debt’s overall balance sheet is a priori always equal to zero. Individual balance sheets however, which vary over time according to the life stage of each individual and the principles of distributive justice that regulate society and legitimize the existence of powers responsible for keeping accounts, can be positive, negative or null, and never have to be balanced if society is to continue its course (Théret 2018). Thus, the day-to-day and long-term reproduction of the “life capital” of a population forming a sovereign society depend on the closure of the intermingled economic circuits of public and social finances. The issuance by the State, or other public powers, of means of payment pledged against anticipated levies, whose reflux into the public treasuries’ coffers depends on the actual payment of these levies, finds its rationality and legitimacy in this circuit (Théret 2022a).
To sum up, our interpretation of contemporary societies is as follows (Théret 1998). The monetarization of life debt has enabled its differentiation. It has been split into economic short-term commercial debts on one side, and biopolitical long-term social debts on the other side. Economic debt, produced by the social division of labor, market exchanges and credit banking operations, although one can be freed of it by a payment in money, is marked by its origin since it is a debt that eventually is owed by the individual to the Whole represented by money. However, its relationship with time is reversed, as it no longer refers to a past existential debt, but is secularized and based on anticipations of the future. This form of debt is associated with free enterprise and can be repaid on a day-to-day basis through monetary payments. Social debt, on the other hand, remains like the primordial life debt, based on a representation of the past, on “inherited” claims-beliefs from which we cannot free ourselves. But it is now based on a reversed representation of the creditor/debtor relationship of the individual to the Whole of society, since it means that it is society that is now indebted vis-à-vis its members, e.g. the people: the social debt (that is both fiscal and mutual life debts) is a sacralized immanence (and no more an embodied transcendence) made up of the individual assets of life that society must preserve. Weakened by both this reversal of the source of sovereignty and the emergence of an autonomous economic order where all debts are releasable, the state, which until this double advent had jointly and concurrently monopolized sovereignty rights on society with the church, must now, in order to be legitimate, place itself in the position of guarantor of these new forms of debt. However, this does not imply that it monopolizes the social credit associated with them since state’s fiscal vertical debts are in competition with social insurances’ managed diagonal debts; moreover, as the state is monopolizing physical violence, it is always possible that it defaults on its obligations concerning its social debt and the rule of law and aims at maintaining itself mainly by physical violence as the “principal”, instead of remaining an “agent” owing protection to the people. Effectively, this is the present situation to-day after forty years of neoliberal capitalism[22].
The “finance people” view of sovereign and social debts
Let’s come now to the finance people’s and mainstream economics and political actors’ common sense on what are sovereign and social debts. First, it is important to recall that in the whole corpus of economics, the idea of a plurality of form of debts as we have described it above, is repressed and denegated; debts are only commercial contractual debts, and this applies also to debts involving governments and other public organizations. Thus sovereign debt for financial actors and neoliberal propagandists is not the reciprocal life debt/credit of the authorized sovereign powers towards the sovereign authority of the people; this latter form of debt is desacralized if not made invisible or denied, and what is called sovereign debt is the debt contracted by sovereign powers on financial markets. In other words, the sovereign debt is not the debt that sovereign powers owe to the public and the citizens, but their debt vis-à-vis the “finance people”, e.g. the rentiers of the public financial debt.
Similarly, for instance in France, the social debt is not the reciprocal debt/credit of the society vis-à-vis its members, but the accumulated budget deficits of the social security system that the “Caisse d’amortissement de la dette sociale” (CADES) is responsible for funding on the financial markets and extinguishing. Thus, social debt is for neoliberals a subcategory of the sovereign debt understood not as an authoritative tutelary debt, but as a category of debt authorized by financial markets; this is a complete reversal of the sociological conception presented above in which it is the sovereign state debt that is part of the authoritative debt of solidarity keeping societies agoing and united.
This testifies of a new reversal in the conception of what must be sovereign in capitalist-statist societies, namely either the power of owners of contractual public debts and their agents, which, thanks to their backing by the sovereign authority of the neoliberal economic religion of market efficiency whose sacred Great Text is that of the neoclassical financial theory, or the power of creditors of tutelary life debts of territorial belonging (Lemoine et Théret 2017, pp. 20-21). Yet, in practice in the financial sphere, it is recognized that for developed states historically indebted with regard to the people, besides policies of financialization of pensions and of privatization of healthcare, education, transportation, civil security, etc., this implies the states to default on their social debt. Thus, for finance people, social debt is something effective but has to be depreciated and desacralized[1]. For rating agencies for instance,“financial debt is thus conceived as a rigid contract, whereas social debt is envisaged only as a flexible contract, a social “convention” and a simple, reversible political “promise”, which is easier, and above all necessary, for the sovereign to go back on.” (Lemoine 2016, p. 286)
In other words, although social debt is ideologically denied in the mainstream economics, contemporary financial actors are nonetheless aware that in liberal democratic societies there are two competing and antagonistic forms of sovereign debt. Then the question of the social sustainability of a sovereign power exercised by market finance arises when an evergrowing accumulation of state financial debt entails a series of defaults on social debt, while, despite the efforts of its high priests (Théret forthcoming), the financial religion is not shared by all, notably by taxpayers. From this point of view, the Covid19 pandemic crisis of 2020-2021 is precisely a crisis of overaccumulation by the states of their unpaidsocial debt vis-à-vis their citizens during the last forty years of neoliberal rule, meanwhile the mass and burden of the “sovereign debt” of the states vis-à-vis financial markets were growing. The pandemic, and the inability of governments to respond to it in a strictly health-related way, highlight the existence of this unpaid social debt to creditors who, in France for instance, were already before the pandemic demanding compensation for it. Thus at the paroxysmal moment of the health crisis, when the decision was taken to confine drastically the populations, by halting a large part of economic activity while supporting incomes, the repressed idea that legitimacy of the modern state essentially rests on its ability to honor the social debt it owes reappeared[23].
For instance, the French President E. Macron, an occasional banker (Rothschild) and a professional politician, in his address on television of March 16th 2020 announcing the covid19 shutdown for France declared:
“We are at war. The Nation will support its children who (…) are in the front line (…). They have rights over us. We obviously owe them the means, the protection (…) I ask you to make sacrifices (…). (But) they must never jeopardize aid to the most vulnerable, the survival of a company, the means of subsistence of employees and the self-employed.”
Similarly, M. Draghi, an occasional Italian Prime Minister and a professional banker (Goldman Sachs, Bank of Italy and European Central Bank), declared a few days after, in the Financial Times of the 25th of March 2020:
« We face a war against coronavirus and must mobilize accordingly: (…) The loss of income incurred by the private sector — and any debt raised to fill the gap — must eventually be absorbed, wholly or in part, on to government balance sheets. (…) It is the proper role of the state to deploy its balance sheet to protect citizens and the economy against shocks that the private sector is not responsible for and cannot absorb.”
In both these statements, the State’s debt of social protection is acknowledged, albeit in the context of a situation likened to war. And contrary to E. Macron’s assertion that “the next day, when we’ve won, it won’t be a return to the day before”, they were quickly forgotten by their authors. In the case of France, the only change on the day after concerned the name of the presidential political party, which used to be “La République en marche” and is now “Renaissance“. As for public and social services, they have continued to deteriorate, and funding for social protection to decline. Today, the state’s financial debt is higher than ever, and austerity policies concerning social security benefits and the underfunding of healthcare, education and pensions, etc. are back in town. This return to the norms of standard neoliberal policies is the direct consequence of the funding of the expansion of protective measures during the crisis by additional public indebtedness on the markets[24]. This additional growth of “sovereign debts” has reduced confidence in the creditworthiness of the states and led to the revival of deflationary austerity policies further increasing the deficits of social protection and state legitimacy, the ultimate consequence of this logic being the current rise of far-right parties in many countries.
But the covid19 health crisis has also revealed that the neoliberal reversal of the hierarchy between financial debts and social debts does not only concern public default on social benefits and economic policies of financialization and privatization of public services; it is also anchored on a deeper symbolic change in the representation of life debt, now referring to a self-reliant individual. Thus, I’ll now focus on this symbolic transformation which may explain not only the health care crisis of 2020-21 but also, for a part, why neoliberal politics and policies are so resilient to the series of financial crises since 2007.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
brunotheret (20 mars 2025). SOVEREIGN AND SOCIAL DEBTS (2/3): The modern forms of life debt. Sociologie politique de l'économie. Consulté le 7 février 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13kmw