AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEM

This essay explores the objectification of relationships and the volatility of things in nineteenth-century liberalism by looking at the routine collection of debts. In particular, I examine methods of collateralization and focus on the role that movable collateral had in the borrower-lender relationship. My approach highlights an otherwise inconspicuous object within the debt relationship: the collateral itself. Placing the collateral object at the center of historical analysis offers new perspectives on the history of debt and, more generally, the complicated relationship between personhood and things in nineteenth-century everyday life. For the object meant to provide a guarantee—the good used as collateral—in its materiality encapsulates social relations. The characteristics of collateralization become urgent in cases of debt collection in which objects are legally seized. I appraise such property seizure in the context of other forms of collateralization such as the pawning of objects. I draw upon anthropological theory to better understand the ways in which collateral objects were assessed, fenced in, and transferred—in other words, how these unremarkable things became objects of knowledge.

I will argue that the methods of collateralization provided a basic legal technique that stabilized the relationality of debt in nineteenth-century liberalism, and yet these same methods also introduced new, irreconcilable irritations. The approach proposed here provides new insights into the culture of borrowing and lending, and ultimately into the everyday workings of liberalism.Footnote ¹ I will map out my understanding of liberalism as my argument unfolds, but for the moment, let me propose an initial definition of liberalism as a “rule at a distance” intended to create self-regulating circuits of goods, people, and information.Footnote ² Liberalism was further, and essentially, linked to the rule of law, principles of due process, and a distinct valorization of private property. And liberalism was, finally, acutely preoccupied with the relation between subject and object, between personhood and things. My case study is Switzerland, a country that was viewed as a laboratory of economic and political liberalism. There, liberalism's legal techniques of debt collection were based on customary routines; a law of practices, so to speak.Footnote ³

My focus on collateralization allows me to provide specific historical answers to broad questions: it elucidates the inner life of nineteenth-century liberalism by examining the everyday efforts of historical actors to mobilize things, to keep the categories of “things” and “persons” separated, and to tirelessly fabricate a circumscribed realm for things as things. Law played a constitutive role in “dividing up inchoate substance into discernible chunks of stuff,” as has recently been argued in a suggestive article on the materiality of law.Footnote ⁴ In what follows, I examine these mundane legal techniques with an eye toward knowledge practices in order to understand how the experience of things shaped new concepts. In other words, I will analyze how thought occurred via things.Footnote ⁵ Thus my argument expands on long-held interests in the historiography of lending and borrowing with its keen sense for material culture.Footnote ⁶ For, as has been observed for early modern times and for the nineteenth century alike, the perceived creditworthiness of a person was a “fluctuating identity,” linked to personal appearance and demeanor in which immaterial and material dimensions overlapped.Footnote ⁷ In credit dealings, objects were constantly an indicator of social significance and thus provided a point of orientation for the historical actors.Footnote ⁸ The social fabric of credit had tangible aspects. Yet the three-way relationship between objects, their monetary value, and the personhood of the debtor was repeatedly contested. The use of goods as collateral thus illustrates the persistently difficult relationship between personhood and mobile objects. With respect to the history of nineteenth-century liberalism, this is an argument that stresses both continuities and specificity. An uneasiness with the ability to move and fix objects can be traced to much earlier epochs and remains urgent for debt dealings in present-day capitalism.Footnote ⁹ For example, medievalist Martha Howell points to the legal techniques in late-medieval commerce that drew a distinction between mobile and immobile goods and allowed for specific types of mobilization of each.Footnote ¹⁰ Conversely, anthropologist Janet Roitman observes regarding foreclosed houses in the United States after 2008 that no a priori value lying in a material object (a home) was being translated into house prices, but rather the reverse: processes of valuation led to the expulsion of inhabitants and affected the materiality of the objects, turning houses into ruins.Footnote ¹¹

And yet the story of nineteenth-century debt law also gives indication for historical specificity and changes when legal experts as well as ordinary creditors and debtors negotiated the status of human bodies, pocket watches, religious icons, or dung piles as collateral. Liberal nineteenth-century legal principles fostered a material conception of property that equated ownership with the total and perfect sovereignty over an object.Footnote ¹² And if the subject was formed by the possession of objects, as presupposed in the legal and cultural expectations of liberalism, persons and their things were intertwined, and the seizure of goods touched upon a sensible link.Footnote ¹³

I try to substantiate this argument in four steps. I first provide some context for the Swiss system of debt collection and for my methodological focus on collateralization's knowledge practices. I then outline how legal techniques of collateralization, despite their seeming simplicity, hid fundamental contradictions. Since such contradictions become especially apparent in borderline cases of collateralization, section three presents two such cases that were common, albeit precarious in the nineteenth century: the imprisonment of debtors, where the body served as collateral, and the pawning of goods. This takes us to certain limits on collateralization that exempted some household goods from seizure. Such limits, which were intended to protect the debtor, were discussed in relation to a federal law in 1892 in a moment when the subsistence level was an issue of widespread social debate. In the conclusion, I propose a historical epistemology of the collateral object by linking the changing ways of collateralization to different ways of knowing: compartmentalized, investigative, liminal, or taxonomical forms of knowledge.

SITUATING COLLATERAL

To delve into the specificities of collateral, nineteenth-century Switzerland is an apt case. In this early industrialized society debt collection remained based on received practices, until the latter were standardized in a federal law, the “federal statute on debt enforcement and bankruptcy” that was passed in 1889 and went into effect in 1892. There was much continuity between early modern systems and liberalism's rule of law: the collection of debts relied on accessible, quotidian ways of legal procedure whose administrative barriers (the costs and efforts it required of creditors and debtors alike), however, were successively lowered throughout the nineteenth century. By century's end, the federal law of 1892 established a fundamental difference between bankruptcy proceedings—which involved inventorying a debtor's entire property and redistributing it among his creditors according to a fixed allocation formula—and attachment—in which property of the debtor was seized for each individual claim.Footnote ¹⁴ Prior to the introduction of this federal law, many variations and combinations of these basic models of debt collection existed, and objects could be attached to force payment in a variety of ways.Footnote ¹⁵

Debt collection also touched upon the status of citizenship, which itself, in turn, underwent changes in the nineteenth century, because the bankruptcy of a male debtor resulted in his loss of civic rights. This stripping on one's honor was of great concern within a republican political system which, compared to the other European states, was based on an unprecedented level of male suffrage.Footnote ¹⁶ While the social effects and cultural significance of bankruptcy proceedings have garnered significant attention from historians, I address here the less conspicuous moment at which property was legally seized.Footnote ¹⁷ After all, a contemporary expert estimated that 75 to 80 percent of all cases of debt collection in Switzerland involved the seizure of collateral objects, handled by low-level officials, rather than bankruptcy proceedings (they had, however, the same effect on the debtor's civic rights if he was completely stripped of all his assets).Footnote ¹⁸ These seizures were inconspicuous and simple: the value of the seized goods was only roughly estimated because the latter were only temporarily attached (in most cases, the debtor paid before the goods were liquidated), and, in cases of liquidation, in most instances were subject to an auction. It is therefore important to emphasize the limited administrative costs of the legal system of debt collection in Switzerland in the nineteenth century. Attachment involved little state intervention: a system of deadlines and sanctions governed these administrative routines of summary justice almost independently, and judicial hearings were rarely necessary.Footnote ¹⁹

Legal experts were certain that the various laws of debt enforcement had “grown on the soil of habit.”Footnote ²⁰ Debt collection by attachment was based on stable procedures from early modern times when republican, communal forms of governance were imbricated with newly emerging forms of state expertise. In the course of the nineteenth century, new supervising bodies assumed authority over these entrenched legal routines. The principles of due process and transparency of the state were tied to decentralized power and localized oversight. The systematization of received forms of procedure gave the ways of debt enforcement characteristics that we might term “liberal.” Distant, mediated forms of power became more widespread, for instance, when during the first half of the century insolvent debtors were proclaimed less and less publicly (as in Sunday church), and instead by way of the newly installed official gazette.Footnote ²¹ With the reordering of government in many Swiss cantons by the 1830s, procedures of debt collection were further systematized and made more accessible: deadlines were successively shortened, procedural fees were lowered, oversight of local level officials was tightened, and bankruptcy statistics were made public. Above all, this system in the interest of the preservation of private property and credit was centered on objects. Delineating and transferring things in order to guarantee a creditor's claim was done by a compartmentalized way of knowing: instead of being the subject of protracted negotiations, a thing simply stood in for the owed sum. The advantages of this approach were not lost on contemporary experts. For example, a German handbook on economic and legal government recommended the Swiss system of debt collection, noting that it was “much more rigorously and beneficially arranged” than its counterparts in most German lands.Footnote ²²

However, how to speak of these legal practices as liberal? Liberalism is clearly a multifaceted, contested term, yet in the context of the economic and legal routines dealt with in this essay, the aspects that inform my use of the term converge in their relationship to materiality. The political effects of objects’ arrangements thus present one possibility for a study of the practical workings of liberalism. Liberalism mobilized materials, as historians have shown with regards to urban surroundings: asphalt floors, glass display windows, systems of pipes, and postal routes facilitated solidity, transparency, smoothness, and efficiency.Footnote ²³ Under liberalism, authority was conveyed in large part via objects, but the very “thingness” of these objects repeatedly limited and thwarted liberal governance.Footnote ²⁴ Burst pipes, broken glass windows, brittle concrete, and lost mailings testified to the contingency of the material world. The structure of power in liberalism was facilitated by the definition, measure, appraisal, and transferal of objects. In the process of completing these everyday transactions, new imponderabilities constantly emerged. Thus examining which techniques were employed to seize, limit, and transfer property in such cases reveals a profound ambiguity within the social life of property in the nineteenth century, because in collateralization the fundamental relationality of debts became locked up in an object.Footnote ²⁵ While collateralization, as it had been handled since early modern times, substantially simplified the process of debt collection, it also created unsolvable problems that demonstrate a blind spot in liberalism's regime of truth.

In order to dissect such blind spots certain research strands between history, anthropology, and science studies “symmetrize” the relationship between people and things by regarding material and symbolic dimensions in one analytical frame. Among historians such a program is most commonly associated with Bruno Latour's plea for an “agency of objects,” to take up a phrase coined by Bert de Munck.Footnote ²⁶ However, in this case it is the anthropologists Marilyn Strathern and Annelise Riles, and not Latour, who have provided the theoretical impulse.Footnote ²⁷ Personhood and things, according to Strathern and Riles, are mutually interdependent; they do not exist beyond their relation, but are created by the interactions of contrasting perspectives. This opens new possibilities for examining knowledge practices; for example, processes of estimation and worth measurement via which historical actors shaped economic variables like “value” or “commodity” by classifying certain things as “economic.”Footnote ²⁸ In the relationship between creditor and debtor, the collateral stands in as what Riles terms a “placeholder.” Collateral as a placeholder is a device that mediates a credit relationship. It temporarily stands in for the duration of the unmet debt. As an object, it brings the instability of the debt relationship to a halt. Viewed in temporal terms, the placeholder is an object of suspension. Collateral works as if the transaction had already taken place; “it forecloses the question of the moment for the near future,” Riles writes, “by creating a dummy solution subject to future reevaluation.”Footnote ²⁹

Fairly inconspicuous knowledge practices created the conditions under which this substitution could take place. Here comes into play what I would like to call a historical epistemology of the collateral object. As historian Ann Laura Stoler has shown, historical epistemology has developed a much more “worldly” scholarly usage beyond that of a formal theory of scientific knowledge.Footnote ³⁰ Accordingly, concepts and techniques that bring to the fore certain forms of knowledge have become evident in the most varied of contexts, not just in the scientific laboratory or the scholar's library. “Value” is such a fundamental concept, to which “insolvency” is related.Footnote ³¹ The process of posting collateral in a debtor-creditor relationship contained moments of appraisal and commensuration in which concrete particularities had to be transformed into interchangeable values.Footnote ³² Different ways of knowing took shape in these procedures, as will be shown in the course of this essay. As I will argue while looking, in the subsequent sections, at the seizure of objects, the imprisonment of debtors, pawnbroking, and the limits on seizure that protected a debtor, forms of knowledge that were compartmentalized, investigative, liminal, or taxonomical lent themselves to the different forms of assessing and transferring things in collateralization. At the same time, “epistemological fears”—to adapt the fitting phrase used by Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, and Ann Laura Stoler—impinged on the practices used to determine value, property, and insolvency.Footnote ³³ The seizure of the collateral object was in essence a sequestration of the social relationship in a thing and consequentially a controlling of this “epistemic anxiety.”Footnote ³⁴ Yet the methods of collateralization themselves simultaneously threatened to undermine the practice of debt enforcement at an epistemic level.

ATTACHING PROPERTY, FABRICATING COLLATERAL

To seize property in order to legally collect debts had something of a fundamental balance of power between two opponents, as contemporaries repeatedly observed. Debtors who hid their property to prevent its seizure competed with creditors who strove to attach the debtors’ most precious goods.Footnote ³⁵ In the words of the historian Jonathan Sperber, hiding assets from creditors was a “major nineteenth-century participant and spectator sport.”Footnote ³⁶ In this everyday shuffling of property back and forth, seizure of goods was an inconspicuous procedure. Whereas bankruptcy proceedings were often drawn out and required the compilation of a comprehensive inventory of a debtor's property by a certified notary, the records associated with the attachment of a debtor's assets were often rudimentary and compiled by lesser communal bailiffs. As a “placeholder” in the debt relationship, collateral made exact knowledge unnecessary. Instead of a careful evaluation of value, a number of things could simply be attached. Since the things were only meant to be attached temporarily—and, in fact, often remained within the household of the debtor unless the creditor demanded their removal—it was not necessary to assign a monetary value to each individual item.Footnote ³⁷ The respective bailiffs did not need to know much. They only appraised whether or not the total value of the attached goods equaled that of the outstanding debt. A few simple notes in a standardized, preprinted record book were sufficient in such cases. In that sense, collateralization created, as Annelise Riles calls it, “a set of routinized knowledge practices.”Footnote ³⁸

This basic legal technique, however, which did not generally involve a judge, often encountered practical complications. Attachment worked within the structure of social obligations. Local authorities secretly strove to counter the danger of domino effects that could result from insolvency. In an effort to avoid the costs associated with having to provide for a bankrupt debtor from the communal alms, these local officials chronically drew out the proceedings. When, by the 1830s, liberal cantonal governments introduced new forms of justice and transparency, countless complaints concerning this neglect came to light.Footnote ³⁹ The local officials proved especially reticent when faced with the final auction of attached property.

Beyond this reticence, however, the sheer materiality of objects created difficulties. As a petition from officials in Zurich shows, the impounding of animals was especially difficult.Footnote ⁴⁰ The overseeing authority in one case wrote, “it is easy to make a mistake concerning the true worth of a horse,” as another official had done when he recorded a horse—“brown, ca. eight years old”—as collateral for 300 francs, but which only brought seventy-two francs at auction.Footnote ⁴¹ Furthermore, employment in rural industries necessitated borrowing and lending.Footnote ⁴² Within the cottage industry system, raw materials and prefabricated pieces were put out and circulated, and it was sometimes not clear to whom they belonged at any particular moment of time.Footnote ⁴³ Local officials accordingly insisted that cloth, silk thread, and other raw materials should be excluded from the attached property of weavers, because otherwise their employers would be aggrieved.Footnote ⁴⁴

Certain claims could stand in opposition to the demands of other creditors. This was especially true of wages and board paid in advance, as was the case when factory owners who had advanced money to their workers reclaimed their prepayment vis à vis the demands of the workers’ grocery dealers or other creditors. Thus the garnishing of wages was complicated by the methods of payment and the intermittent nature of wage labor.Footnote ⁴⁵ Only with the normalization of regular monetary wages towards the end of the nineteenth century could the garnishing of future wages become widespread.Footnote ⁴⁶

Before the federal law of 1892, attached property was dealt with in a variety of ways. In some alpine regions there was no auction at all, but rather the seized property was simply turned over to the creditor in lieu of payment.Footnote ⁴⁷ Supporters of standardizing the legal process viewed this as a sign of economic backwardness.Footnote ⁴⁸ One pamphleteer called this direct exchange of attached items “a true scandal” and held that if attached property was not subjected to the price mechanism of an auction, a true assessment of its value was impossible: “How should a local official accurately estimate the value of attached materials, paintings, trinkets? He will easily guess too high, too low. And what should a merchant in Berne do with an old dinghy which is transferred to him somewhere on the banks of Lake Lucerne?”Footnote ⁴⁹

Seizing someone's property, as judicial officials concurred, was to place a wager in accordance with its monetary value. Experts also agreed, however, that the subjective value of property was higher than this exchange value in the substitution. This referred to the fact that an object always brought less at auction than it was considered to be worth in practice.Footnote ⁵⁰ Commentators observed that a washing trough, sofa, or table made of pine auctioned off to the highest bidder brought in less than it was worth to the household of the debtor. This asymmetry in the disposability of things went along with the compulsory nature of attachment, even though officials emphasized that the seizure and sale was meant not to punish the debtor but rather to satisfy the creditor with money. The discrepancy between the legal assertion that the seizure of property was meant not as punishment but rather as compensation, and the material, asymmetrical, subjective utility of the respective goods on which the system of debt collection was based, points to an internal contradiction of attachment.

The mobilization of goods, intended to enable the “free flow” aimed for in a liberal economy, increased over the course of the nineteenth century as systems of debt collection changed. The legal conception of collateral was not uniform: an object that had been mortgaged based upon the assumption of future appreciation was different than a portable asset that could be carried to the pawnshop or seized in attachment. All these renderings of collateral, however, shared a conception of property as a thing, and in all such cases, the legal distinction between real property and movable assets was significant.Footnote ⁵¹ In the case of a mortgage, transferable property was rooted in immovable things.Footnote ⁵² Over the course of the nineteenth century, these deposits became increasingly liquid, for example when annuities that had once been “in perpetuity” were converted into bonds that could be terminated.Footnote ⁵³ In Zurich this liquidation of “eternal pensions” occurred in 1853 in the context of an expanding financial sphere and new targets for investment that challenged the privileged position previously held by mortgaged credit.Footnote ⁵⁴ One observer suggested in 1869 that previously, in the old days, “it had been left to the goodwill of the bond debtor, whether he paid the interest on time or not; if so, he received a nice tip and a sausage together with a generous drink as a token of gratitude; if not, he received the same as a matter of habit. This is no longer the case; the capital that is not absorbed by the railroad and other joint-stock industries is invested in government bonds with decent interest and maximum profits.”Footnote ⁵⁵

The process of collateralization undermined the conceptual distinction between fixed and movable assets, for mortgages on “fixed property” could be converted into freely circulating securities. A judicial expert thus observed in the mid-nineteenth century that “the strange situation has emerged that the claims to mortgaged real estate are included among the movable assets of the creditors and among the real property of the debtor.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Mortgages thus simultaneously appeared as liquid and solid, and they repeatedly led to confusion about the status of real, fixed property and movable things.

What is more, collateralization not only fabricated abstraction and the transformation of specifics into generalized equivalents, but, even more, it shaped new particularities itself.Footnote ⁵⁷ The method of collateralization created its own tangibility. This can be illustrated in an example of mortgaged real property. In a period of economic crisis linked to the cotton shortage caused by the American Civil War, a wave of unsettling arson cases swept through several Swiss cantons in early summer 1867. A newspaper in Zurich blamed the discrepancy between the plummeting value of mortgaged real estate compared with the relatively high value for which it was insured. When a bubble in the real estate market collapsed in the 1860s, real estate prices had bottomed out and banks became extremely reluctant to lend. Insurance values, however, remained high, meaning that “the hard-pressed in their need” who wanted “to avoid going bankrupt” were driven to become “firebugs.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Whether via the attachment of household utensils, animals, and property titles, demands for credit, or even the ruination of a property, the process of posting collateral transformed these objects. For, as becomes most starkly apparent in the arson case, it was the status of the objects as collateral in processes of commensuration that affected the objects’ materiality. What is more, collateral also restructured interpersonal relations. In the course of the century, new forms of economic exchange strengthened not only financial intermediaries, as is recounted in familiar historical narratives on the modernization of credit markets, but simultaneously also restructured the mediative potential of personal relationships. In this context, I would like to point out the practice of co-signing loans, a specific configuration of personhood and debt that collateralized personal relationships themselves. By the 1880s, during a protracted economic crisis, edifying texts, novels, and social interventions warned with heightened urgency about the “dangers of co-signing” a surety.Footnote ⁵⁹ By that time, banks increasingly required a co-signer to provide an additional security for loans, and social commentators viewed this as a dangerous objectification of relationships. The supposedly traditional form of intermediation in which persons intervened to guarantee loans gained new importance with the emergence of new financial institutions and in the context of a modern economic crisis.

To preliminarily conclude the argument so far, it is possible to highlight the contradictory roles that collateralization played in legal and economic aspects of everyday life. On one hand, impounding property simplified debt collection. This straightforward administrative procedure made do with a short-cut heuristics. The collateral served as a “placeholder,” making complicated appraisal of property values unnecessary and leading to what I would call, with respect to the way of knowing involved, a form of compartmentalized knowledge. The social relationship implicit in property was relegated to a thing. Collateralization thus provided a simple legal infrastructure for credit transactions. Yet, collateralization also created new social ties. To frame an object as collateral did not reduce the intricacies of the social context but rather intensified them. In this sense, the methods of collateralization were prone to irritations: in the interest of enforcing contracts and regulating property relationships, collateralization complicated the relationship between creditors and debtors, and between the categories of persons and things. Borderline cases of collateralization shed light on this twofold effect between entanglement and disentanglement.Footnote ⁶⁰ The following section addresses two particularly striking nineteenth-century examples of this: pawning, and the incarceration of debtors in which the body served as collateral.

BORDERLINE CASES: PAWNBROKING AND INCARCERATION OF DEBTORS

Pawnbroking was a marginal phenomenon in Switzerland, but it opens an exemplary vista on the relationship that linked personhood and objects in the nineteenth-century imaginary.Footnote ⁶¹ Long-term historical studies of pawnbroking in Europe have shown how civil and ecclesiastical authorities and, later, agencies of the bourgeois civil society assumed control of the system of pawnbroking in order to limit it.Footnote ⁶² In Switzerland the “question of pawnbroking” was dealt with by philanthropic organizations, especially the private and predominantly Protestant Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft. Bourgeois philanthropists hoped to promote virtues of diligence and abstention by institutionalizing savings; pawnbroking was morally precarious in their eyes.Footnote ⁶³ These middle-class observers of working-class life viewed pawnbroking as an “alchemical endeavor,” in which personal objects were converted into their monetary values.Footnote ⁶⁴ The nexus of material deposits and liquid cash struck the philanthropists simultaneously as a relic of a bygone age and a phenomenon of urban hypermodernity. One philanthropist viewed pawnbroking as “an institution of the Middle Ages, which in some regards strangely extends into our own, fundamentally different era.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In the nineteenth century, according to this commentator, pawnbroking was obsolete, since capital had become “more liquid” and was accessible to those “less well off.” At the same time, however, the anonymity of the “large cosmopolitan metropolis,” in which the poor and the rich were largely separated, necessitated pawnbroking, this philanthropist opined. He referred to the example of Paris, where supposedly, at the end of each summer, “twenty thousand parasols” found their way into pawnshops and 28 million francs were thus “shut up in the pawnshop as though dead.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In the eyes of bourgeois commentators, pawnshops served as “institutions for the support of squandering” because the practice of pawning threatened to obscure the limits between subjective needs and objective means.Footnote ⁶⁷ From this perspective, pawnbroking was a liminal practice, strangely located between medieval “alchemical” exchanges and an anonymous, metropolitan modernity. According to this view, pawnbroking packed objects away as dead capital and animated quixotic desires.

Although pawnbroking was criticized as an antiquated mechanism, the pledged objects were often decidedly modern, as is perhaps epitomized in the pocket watch, a liberal object par excellence.Footnote ⁶⁸ Pocket watches were initially a moderate luxury object, but the prices sank starting in the 1870s and they soon became affordable objects that could also be easily liquefied.Footnote ⁶⁹ Timepieces and jewelry of silver and gold made up nearly half the objects pawned in the city of Basel at the end of the century.Footnote ⁷⁰ For gold and silver jewelry, pawnbrokers gave loans for up to 80 percent of the material value; other objects could be pawned for approximately two-thirds of their market value.Footnote ⁷¹ Priority was given to personal effects with clear delineation of personal property, which did not affect the interwoven relationship of proto-industrial production. The founders of such an establishment in Basel emphasized that they would not accept silk or other raw materials for fabrication as collateral.Footnote ⁷²

Proponents of the pawning system—in Basel these came from among the ranks of lower craftsmen—emphasized that pawnbroking made the movable goods of a household productive. If the income of a household was insufficient, then this “minor capital tied up in the movable property” provided the only access to credit.Footnote ⁷³ This also benefited those business owners who had opened accounts for these families.Footnote ⁷⁴ Pawnbroking was thus seen to stabilize the relationship of exchange beyond the limits of the working class. On the other end of the spectrum, bourgeois philanthropists employed rhetoric about discipline and frugality.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, the suggestion that pawnbroking should be a type of “alchemy” goes further: it points to the particularity and the liquidation of objects. In the eyes of the bourgeois philanthropists, these objects were meant for the individual's use alone. From this perspective, the shift of intimate objects from the register of private property to the provider of a financial guarantee represented an impermissible misappropriation. The pawnshop made the contradiction between the particularity of the object and its exchange value clear. It fed the anxiety of middle-class commentators that objects to which one had an intimate relationship could be exchanged for anonymous currency.Footnote ⁷⁶ The corresponding values did not lend themselves to abstraction; they did not disappear, but remained material and visible in the objects stored in the pawn shop. This made the phenomenon difficult to classify; with respect to the way of knowing involved, it facilitated liminal relations that seemed to embody simultaneously medieval backwardness and urban, modern anonymity.

A parallel, if different, problematic of exchangeability and materiality can be found in the incarceration of debtors. The attachment of persons in debtors’ prison created a conundrum in which the problem of offsetting bodies and values, the objectification of the person and the freedom of property, became especially apparent. Debtors’ prisons preoccupied the political imaginary in a variety of national contexts.Footnote ⁷⁷ Countless commentators have denounced the nexus of monetary value and persons, of private and public rights, as atavism in need of civilization. As Gustav Peebles argued in an article, opponents to debtors’ prison depicted the monetization of a body as an internal barbarism in liberal economic life, thereby claiming for a further conceptual separation of subject and object.Footnote ⁷⁸ Comparative historical studies show that detention of the debtors’ bodies was most common where the seizure of their property was legally complicated, as was the case, for example, in England.Footnote ⁷⁹ For the French case, historian Erika Vause has shown how incarceration served as an intermittent method of coming to terms with the mobile, mercantile economy.Footnote ⁸⁰ In countries where it was relatively easy to attach property, like in Switzerland, such arrests were of marginal importance.

The denunciatory rhetoric surrounding debtors’ prisons was also basically absent in Switzerland. Although imprisonment for debt was addressed only offhandedly in Switzerland, elements of a rhetoric of progress were nevertheless present in the few deliberations on the subject: attachment of individuals was only known in a “few” remaining cantons, wrote a legal author in 1858, who then, paradoxically, went on to name a number of industrial centers in addition to Zurich: Basel, Vaud, Geneva, Berne, as well as Neuchâtel and Valais.Footnote ⁸¹ In that sense, although incarceration existed, it led to very few conflicts with the legitimizing repertoire of the liberal imagination. This was due at least in part to the fact that there was no consistent model of incarceration in Switzerland. In the mercantile urban canton of Geneva, for example, only merchants who had tried to shirk their financial liabilities were incarcerated (mirroring French laws).Footnote ⁸² In the proto-industrial and industrial canton of Zurich, though, incarceration for debt evolved from an instance for evaluation to a means of coercion employed against the fully destitute.Footnote ⁸³ In such cases, taking possession of the body, which represented the goods of a person, was typically a means to a further type of substitution, namely, the enforcement of payment in installments. Theoretically creditors did not consider themselves compensated by the incarceration of their debtors, but the imprisoned body was seen as a stand-in for the debtor's property. Also, imprisonment was not considered a punishment, but rather a temporary means of execution. In the eighteenth century, incarceration for debt was meant as a “scare tactic” (“Schreckmittel,” as contemporaries called it) to discipline and hold obstinate debtors until their financial situation could be determined and their property inventoried.Footnote ⁸⁴ If the debtors declared bankruptcy, they were released.

Around 1800, however, this changed.Footnote ⁸⁵ Incarcerated debtors were increasingly those who were determined to be completely destitute and to possess nothing of value. Incarceration was used more and more often to exert pressure on the debtor. In this way, the threat of incarceration was present in the liberal era. The scant statistics available show that the number of arrest warrants rose during the crisis in the 1860s, even if, after 1851, such warrants could be issued only at a judge's discretion, meaning that creditors could no longer expect to have a warrant automatically issued if they demanded it.Footnote ⁸⁶ In Zurich and Geneva alike, the number of incarcerations was consistently lower than the number of warrants issued, and imprisoned debtors were typically released within a few days.Footnote ⁸⁷ Debtors made up only a small fragment of the prison population and were incarcerated locally.Footnote ⁸⁸ Of the median 858 warrants issued annually in the years 1860–1868 in Zurich, for example, only a small fraction resulted in imprisonment and the number of warrants is dwarfed by the median almost 140,000 first-dunning letters officially issued every year. However, comparing the number of warrants with the number of debtors who were declared bankrupt—a median 268 for the same period—provides evidence of the considerable impression left by such incarceration.Footnote ⁸⁹ It seems that incarceration was generally an incidental method to exert pressure on destitute debtors, and it was quietly abolished, first within the canton with the revision to the constitution in 1869, and then at the federal level in 1874.Footnote ⁹⁰ Overall, from a method to pin down debtors and to scrutinize their property relations—that is, with respect to the ways of knowing created, an investigative form of knowledge—imprisonment developed into a means of coercion to pressure debtors to mobilize their kinship ties, or other relations, to cover the debt.

One of the few voices to criticize the knowledge practices related to debt imprisonment as inherently contradictory was that of the former mayor of Zurich, Conrad Melchior Hirzel, in a hearing that is preserved only in manuscript form and was probably never printed for distribution.Footnote ⁹¹ In Hirzel's view, incarceration did not lead to transparency and a reasoned access to the debtor's property, but it did create great confusion and arouse uncontrolled passions. It was “obviously capricious” that warrants were routinely issued for debtors who had already declared themselves insolvent.Footnote ⁹² As a temporary measure to detain a debtor while an inventory of his property could be taken, incarceration was a defensible measure. However, as soon as bankruptcy had been officially established, the debtor should be released. Anything else threatened to “destroy the consistency and the stability of different parts of our laws,” according to Hirzel.Footnote ⁹³ Detention of those absolutely unable to pay their debts served no purpose. Moreover, the incarceration undermined the authority of official knowledge, which vouched for the procedures of a declaration of bankruptcy.

Instead of fairly distributing the assets to be liquidated among all the creditors according to established rules, incarceration threatened to become a campaign by one single “revengeful creditor” seeking to throw the “black fortune of an anxious, fleeting, outlawed life” over his debtor.Footnote ⁹⁴ Instead of being a legal measure, incarceration of the debtor took place outside of the law. And instead of being a systematic instrument, imprisonment fueled uncontrolled affects. The public should view creditors who sought to use this method as “hardhearted and zealous.”Footnote ⁹⁵ On the other hand, hypothesized Hirzel, when faced with prison, the debtor was prepared to “take the most desperate of measures” in order to “hold off the rolling wheel of his fortune.” This encouraged secret negotiations between debtors and unscrupulous creditors and gave dishonesty the upper hand over honesty. In fact, legal means would thereby become an “object for sale, which might be put on the market….”Footnote ⁹⁶ Unlike the methodical attachment of property, in Hirzel's opinion imprisonment for debt created new intransparencies. Hirzel's concern was not characterized by universal, abstract views of freedom and property. Again, Hirzel did approve of detention for the purpose of an extensive investigation into a debtor's financial situation. The problem was not a fundamental incommensurability between body and collateral. In fact, Hirzel highlighted what the balancing of body and collateral entailed: instead of clarity, new confusion, and instead of predictability, an increased zeal that ran the knowledge practices of the bankruptcy process into the ground.

If the body represented collateral, which in mid-century was increasing repossessed, the body was not simply an equivalent of money, but rather its incarceration was an impetus for a new settlement: incremental repayment. In this respect the problem, as recognized by the few Swiss critics of the practice of debtor incarceration, was not so much a fundamental incommensurability between body and collateral, but rather that the collateralization of the body created new incalculability because the incarceration undermined the established knowledge practices associated with bankruptcy proceedings.

CONTOURING THE UNATTACHABLE MINIMUM

Parallel to the attachment of objects, human bodies, animals, titles, and entitlements, legal practices shaped the limits of the “unattachable.” One legal thinker suggested a “right of necessity” which should stipulate that a set of indispensable objects be left to the debtor. In both the Elements of the Philosophy of Right and in his lectures concerning legal philosophy, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel referred to the so-called benefit of competence, meaning that a bankrupt craftsman “was left the tools of his trade, and a farmer his field,” and that these were excluded from attachment.Footnote ⁹⁷ The right of necessity was accordingly employed “not only in extreme cases,” but also in everyday contexts.Footnote ⁹⁸ For Hegel, these unseizable objects represented a baseline, necessary in order to participate in the legal sphere at all, “for the alternatives are an infinite injury [Verletzung] to existence with total loss of rights, and an injury only to an individual and limited existence of freedom, whereby right as such and the capacity for rights of the injured party, who has been injured only in this specific property, continues to be recognized.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The right of necessity did not come from a sphere far-removed from the law, but was rather situated in the positive law. Nevertheless, the right of necessity provoked a “collision” or irresolvable situation, since the property rights of the creditor continued to exist even though the right of necessity meant that they were temporarily suspended.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The right to property and the right of subsistence were neither completely incommensurable nor definitively ranked: the liberal legal theoretician Carl von Rotteck viewed the right of necessity as a “contradiction of truths,” which risked that “logic might no longer have a place in legal doctrine.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

The Swiss legal system lacked such intricate legal reasoning, but it, too, recognized the benefit of competence in which an object-based conception of property corresponded to knowledge practices. Until the implementation of the federal law in 1892, the category of the “indispensable” remained narrow and material. The minimum was quasi-sequestrated in things, so to speak. This constellation benefited the division of subject and object in liberalism,Footnote ¹⁰² because it provided for clearly defined material values instead of suspiciously inconsistent, potentially insatiable “needs.” In the canton of Zurich in the 1830s, such exclusions applied to a family's hymnals, the children's schoolbooks, the clothing of the wife and children, and the “indispensable” clothing of the debtor himself, as well as to objects that had been acquired from an institution (military, poor relief, or the fire department). In 1842, gifts to the children from their godparents were added to this list, as were, in mid-century, implements for cooking and bedding, which initially included blankets and pillows and later bedsteads and mattresses. Inconsistencies persisted in the regulations of tools and objects integral to the family's livelihood (dung, but also cooking utensils). The set of indispensables had originally included those things via which the household was linked to the community at large.

In the late nineteenth century, legal thought understood these unattachable objects to be covered by public law or “common welfare.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The federal law of 1892 expanded the category of “indispensables” considerably. It incorporated the rules of French-speaking Switzerland that had been in turn influenced by the more comprehensive stipulations of French law, and the German civil procedure code of 1877.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The debate over who should control household objects at the end of the century came at a moment in which institutional bodies were rapidly expanding to deal with the problems they perceived in an urbanizing, industrializing society. Under the auspices of the nascent welfare state, public administration, bodies of scientific expertise, commercial and philanthropic organizations, and the labor movement ushered in new forms of knowing. At the same time, these institutions attempted to standardize social practices within the fabric of the national state.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Although they were controversial from the very beginning, statistics provided the central tool in this discussion over the objectification of the “social question.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ A popular legal periodical postulated that the federal law of debt enforcement and bankruptcy, by expanding the category of indispensable household objects, was, with regards to the social question, “more important than all the laws regulating liability, accident insurance, and alcohol together.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The “politics of the necessary” were thus renegotiated and the minimum became a key social category.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Some commentators argued that consumers’ creditworthiness would be eroded if wages and household assets could be attached only in part.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Construction workers relied on credit in the winter months, and without the guarantee of their future wages, shopkeepers would give them no credit.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Other observers, however, saw this as a welcome disciplinary measure that would force working-class consumers to pay more frequently in cash.Footnote ¹¹¹ A legal journal pointed out that in the first years after the introduction of the federal law, the officials had been reluctant to attach wages due to the lack of precedent. Objects excluded from attachment were easier to measure than monetary wages.Footnote ¹¹² The suspicion remained that, given the number of indispensable, unattachable objects, it would no longer be possible to collect smaller sums.Footnote ¹¹³ In the first months after the law was introduced, satirical newspaper articles circulated about cunning debtors who, faced with imminent attachment, transferred all their assets into objects that were excluded from such seizure.Footnote ¹¹⁴ According to the federal law, the objects that had been declared indispensable could not be replaced with a respective monetary value. A workers’ organization demanded to no avail that craftsmen should be allowed to retain raw materials necessary for one month's work and that the unemployed should have their payments deferred.Footnote ¹¹⁵ A newspaper supportive of the state paid special attention to insurance payments, which were only partially attachable under the proposed law. It welcomed this as a method of encouraging individuals to “strive for financial security.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Thus the legal regulations of indispensable objects were supposed to discipline, mold, and assess debtors.

As historian Dana Simmons has argued, assessing basic minimal needs is essentially “a political act,” for it means “defining what is universal and law-like, and what is contingent.…”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The debate among experts, politicians, and businesspeople about the limitations of attachment dealt primarily with objects. A “low measured, middling lifestyle” was “fixed as the norm,” as a contemporary legal dissertation expressed it.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Wedding rings were never attachable, while pictures with biblical motifs were, except for “actual pictures of saints”; the question as to whether a man's coat belonged to the indispensables or not was answered in the affirmative in the case of a travelling salesman, but negatively in that of a rural man. Although pocket watches of factory workers were initially controversial, officials quickly declared them to be excluded from attachment; the same was true of the sewing machines with which some female debtors worked on the side.Footnote ¹¹⁹ A wardrobe or a chest of drawers, a washstand, a table, and one chair per person were to be left in the dwelling, and in one case, a sofa that served as a child's bed, as well.Footnote ¹²⁰ Legal institutions debated whether children should be expected to share a bed, but the majority supported this.Footnote ¹²¹ The officials executing the seizure, however, could insist that an expensive bedstead be traded for a simpler one.Footnote ¹²² The theory and practice were expressly meant not to ensure a lifestyle befitting a person's status but rather to balance the standard for a “recognized level in need of protection.”Footnote ¹²³ Here, too, one can speak of a process of normalization qua objects. This normalization, however, was thwarted time and again. One reason for that is the extent to which objects became charged with great meaning. The objects exempt from seizure seemed to be connected to the personhood of the individual in default. The relationship of the person to property was seen in liberalism as a connection worthy of significant protection. Attachment was necessary to guarantee the property rights of creditors. All the same, the seizure of property, as was involved in attachment, was a tricky proposition for the legal imagination. With respect to the ways of knowing involved here, objects provided a means for a taxonomical method of assessing worth and needs, as the indispensable objects exempt from seizure were projected on a generalized level of basic needs.