The Debt of Time and the Secularization of Guilt

Abstract

Debt and Guilt is a work of rare depth and texture, which marks, in the wake of Max Weber ’ s magisterial Protestant Ethic , a decisive step forward in the study of the relationship between religious conceptions and economic practices. Elettra Stimilli masterfully articulates the long and tortuous genealogical path traced by these categories in Western thought, showing their relationship with mechanisms of power and modes of domination. The linear structure of the book cracks open, almost imperceptibly, in a passage, which I would like to examine here