Debt,Corruption, and State Identity: Lessons from Eighteenth-Century Political Thought

The subject of national debt raises serious questions concerning state identity. Should a state that has radically altered its constitution be responsible for decisions taken by the previous state? Much hangs on how we characterize the state as a continuous agent. This article explores debates over national debt, state integrity, and corruption in the eighteenth century, the era in which the modern financial-bureaucratic state was in its infancy. Many eighteenth-century writers treated national debt as corrupting; some advocated voluntary default as a manner of laying low the insidious “moneyed interests” usurping political power. But if public debt was attacked by some as the soul of corruption, others saw it as something that had been made possible by—and was a guarantor of—integrity. These controversies reveal a clash of visions of what constitutes state integrity. This same clash is alive in contemporary debates about national debts.