Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012, 1,999 pp., $13.95 paper(9781584351153) In this brief yet dense theoretical treatise, set out in three brisk chapters and a conclusion, the Paris-based Italian sociologist and philosopher, Maurizio Lazzarato, "offers an exploration and genealogy of the economic and subjective production of indebted man" in what he calls the neoliberal age (p. 9). This age, according to the author, began in the mid1970s with changes to the financing structure of the welfare state such that Western central banks were forbidden to coin interest-free money to ease public debt, and Western countries were compelled to turn to financial markets to service their deficits. The subsequent indebtedness of both individuals, states, and even the entire world to powerful private interests "reveals the extent to which markets have been able to plunder the population over the last forty years" (p. 19). Lazzarato is concerned not simply with the fact of global debt, but more with its fundamentally class-based nature. Finance, he insists, is above all a "universal power relation" between the owner of capital and the nonowner, between creditor and debtor. This transcends and precedes all other social relations, even capital and labour, "since everyone is included within it," including children and the poor, who may have no access to credit, yet remain indebted via the state (p. 32). Indeed, the money economy comes before and determines the market economy (rather than the other way around). What is more, the creditor-debtor power relation is fundamentally asymmetrical, so undermining classical economic theories of "commercial exchange" that imply and presuppose equality between buyer and seller (p. 33), and quashing the fantasy whereby "state and society begin with a contract" (p. 43). In On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche demonstrated his understanding of the primordial primacy of the creditor-debtor relation and the precedence of credit to exchange. Debt, as a promise of repayment and a guarantee of self-worth, first began to engender memory, conscience, repression, calculation, duty, and guilt. It is the origin of subjective evaluation between men, and of "subjectivation"--the labour of man on himself such that he is made predictable, accountable, and answerable to his creditor (p. 42). Through debt, moreover, capitalism "bridges the gap between present and future," which results in the "objectivation" of time--the elimination of future choice and possibility in subordination to the "reproduction of capitalist power relations" (p. 46). The "strange sensation," Lazzarato writes, "of living in a society without time, without possibility, without foreseeable rupture, is debt" (p. 47). A young Karl Marx, Lazzarato maintains, echoed these Nietzschean notes in his early essay, "Comments on James Mill." Creditordebtor seems to run counter to capital-labour, for the latter is a relationship between things, whereas the former appears to establish trust between fellow human beings. Such abolition of estrangement, however, is superficial. Debt actually completes alienation by exploiting man's moral existence, social existence, and "the inmost depths of his heart" (p. 56). Through indebtedness, trust becomes universal distrust, which turns into a demand for security and ultimately state intervention. In the case of welfare, Lazzarato observes, erstwhile social rights have been transformed into latter-day debts, about which recipients of services are to feel guilty and for which they are to have their private lives examined in order to determine their validity and their conformity to the norms of the providing institution. …