‘Monstrous moral hybrids’ and the corrupting quality of public debt

This chapter explores how public debt is a troubling practice for republican and democratic regimes because of its ability to corrupt the language and practice of political economy. For instance, the idea of contract is a perfectly good and sensible concept to apply to the private ordering of economic interaction. When that term is extended to public ordering outside the hypothetical construction of a cooperative state, it becomes a piece of ideology that obscures the role of public debt in promoting the interests of politically dominant groups within society.