The Dawn of Everything

Hardcover, 691 pages

English language

Published Oct. 17, 2021 by Signal.

ISBN:: 978-0-7710-4982-8

(1 review)

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could only be achieved by sacrificing those original freedoms, or alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. Graeber and Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95% of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that …

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could only be achieved by sacrificing those original freedoms, or alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. Graeber and Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95% of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of "the state"? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.

3 editions

loppear reviewed The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber

weakens under closer inspection

3 stars

Wide-ranging on themes of pre-history and archeological evidence for alternative social organization., a rich history of creative perspectives on human relations. Many of the arguments are compelling for non-domination, non-hierarchical societies and rejecting a still-common "myth of progress", "stages of social evolution", or that social inequality is an inevitable or inherent outcome of agriculture or urbanism or social complexity. Instead they find our societal problems in violence, patriarchy, and domination, and point us to look at the margins of history and society for answers.

Upon digging in to most of the areas discussed, looking to cited sources and other current experts in a topic, much of what is presented as novel or based in new evidence gets weaker, unsupported conjecture, or misrepresentation. It took me a while to write this review as it took me a while to become comfortable with this disappointment. There is just too much too broad …

Wide-ranging on themes of pre-history and archeological evidence for alternative social organization., a rich history of creative perspectives on human relations. Many of the arguments are compelling for non-domination, non-hierarchical societies and rejecting a still-common "myth of progress", "stages of social evolution", or that social inequality is an inevitable or inherent outcome of agriculture or urbanism or social complexity. Instead they find our societal problems in violence, patriarchy, and domination, and point us to look at the margins of history and society for answers.

Upon digging in to most of the areas discussed, looking to cited sources and other current experts in a topic, much of what is presented as novel or based in new evidence gets weaker, unsupported conjecture, or misrepresentation. It took me a while to write this review as it took me a while to become comfortable with this disappointment. There is just too much too broad in an attempt to stretch their exploration of what we don't know into a call for social creativity.

I highly recommend James C Scott's "Against The Grain" as a much briefer and tighter treatise on the strongest element of this story, that the modern archeological evidence argues against state hierarchy and exploitation inevitably arising from agriculture and sedentism.