In the wake of the global financial crisis, most of the discussion has been focused on questions of debt. And the response, almost uniformly, has been austerity and privatization: cuts to services that have been painted as forms of reckless spending by a bloated public sector. In Debt or Democracy, Mary Mellor turns the whole conversation upside down, showing that the important question is not who owes what, but who controls the creation and circulation of money in the first place. When the problem is examined from that angle, it becomes clear that privatization, far from being the answer to our problem, is the very source of it—the subordination of public finance to private interest.
 
A direct challenge to conventional economic thinking, Debt or Democracy offers a bracing new analysis of our economic crisis and offers cogent, radical alternatives to create a more just and sustainable economic future.

In the 1970s and 1980s the countries of Latin America dealt with their similar debt problems in very different ways–ranging from militantly market-oriented approaches to massive state intervention in their economies–while their political systems headed toward either democracy or authoritarianism. Applying the tools of modern political economy to a developing-country context, Jeffry Frieden analyzes the different patterns of national economic and political behavior that arose in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela. This book will be useful to those interested in comparative politics, international studies, development studies, and political economy more generally. “Jeffry Frieden weaves together a powerful theoretical framework with comparative case studies of the region’s five largest debtor states. The result is the most insightful analysis to date of how the interplay between politics and economics in post-war Latin America set the stage for the dramatic events of the 1980s.”–Carol Wise, Center for Politics and Policy, Claremont Graduate School

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For the greater part of recorded history the most successful and powerful states were autocracies; yet now the world is increasingly dominated by democracies. In A Free Nation Deep in Debt, James Macdonald provides a novel answer for how and why this political transformation occurred. The pressures of war finance led ancient states to store up treasure; and treasure accumulation invariably favored autocratic states. But when the art of public borrowing was developed by the city-states of medieval Italy as a democratic alternative to the treasure chest, the balance of power tipped. From that point on, the pressures of war favored states with the greatest public creditworthiness; and the most creditworthy states were invariably those in which the people who provided the money also controlled the government. Democracy had found a secret weapon and the era of the citizen creditor was born. Macdonald unfolds this tale in a sweeping history that starts in biblical times, passes via medieval Italy to the wars and revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and ends with the great bond drives that financed the two world wars.

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