States, debt, and power: saints' and 'sinners' in European history and integration

'States, Debt, and Power' deals with one of the most pressing political and policy issues of the 21st century: the so-called 'crisis of debt' with its effects on perceptions of state power and of the relevance and value of democratic politics and of European integration.

Prologue : The perils of sleepwalking -- Contextualizing debt : history, morality, and the triple structural dimension -- The nature of sovereign creditworthiness : hierarchy, sovereignty, and responsibility -- Moralizing credit : bad debt, good debt, and the troubled conscience -- pt. I. Debt and political rule in European history -- The evolution of public debt -- Financial repression, debasement, and the historic arc of default -- Theological traces and social contexts -- The dynamics of public debt in historical perspective : the limitations of formal economic reasoning -- pt. II. Law, culture, and statecraft -- Law, public debt, and the paradoxes of power -- Economic cultures, ideologies of debt, and state virtue -- Space, time, and statecraft : saints, fallen angels, false prophets, redeemers, and sinners -- pt. III. State liability and territorial control -- States and financial markets : the imbalance of power -- Professional consensus, political silence, and sovereign creditworthiness -- The dynamics of external imbalances and debt -- Which truth? the power of numeric indicators and probabilistic reasoning about public debt -- Public debt dynamics : political will and state capacity -- Public debt and multilevel statehood : sub-national fiscal governance, structural imbalances, and 'stand-alone' fiscal capacity -- pt. IV. Sovereign creditworthiness and European integration -- Still the 'old' Europe? historical legacies and long-term political challenges -- The Achilles heel of post-war European integration : endogenous preference formation and the boundaries of creditor-state power -- Epilogue : History as oracle