Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism

Download or read book Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism written by Mischa Suter and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-06-02 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and social theory, this book explores the quotidian routines of debt collection in nineteenth-century capitalism. It focuses on Switzerland, an exemplary case of liberal rule. Debt collection and bankruptcy relied on received practices until they were standardized in a Swiss federal law in 1889. The vast array of these practices was summarized by the idiomatic Swiss legal term “Rechtstrieb” (literally, “law drive”). Analyzing these forms of summary justice opens a window to the makeshift economies and the contested political imaginaries of nineteenth-century everyday life. Ultimately, the book advances an empirically grounded and theoretically informed history of quotidian legal practices in the everyday economy; it is an argument for studying capitalism from the bottom up.