new york times book review the dawn of everything

Digging for Utopia

December 16, 2021 issue

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Ged Quinn: In Heaven Everything Is Fine , 2010–2011

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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

That the history of our species came in stages was an idea that came in stages. Aristotle saw the formation of political entities as a tripartite process: first we had families; next we had the villages into which they banded; and finally, in the coalescence of those villages, we got a governed society, the polis. Natural law theorists later offered fable-like notions of how politics arose from the state of nature, culminating in Thomas Hobbes’s mid-seventeenth-century account of how the sovereign rescued prepolitical man from a ceaseless war of all against all.

But it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a hundred years later, who popularized the idea that we could peer at our prehistory and discern developmental stages marked by shifts in technology and social arrangements. In his Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality (1755), humans went from being solitary brutes to companionable, egalitarian hunter-gatherers; but with the rise of metallurgy and agriculture, things had taken a dire turn: people were civilized, and humanity was ruined. Once you found yourself cultivating a piece of land, ownership emerged: the field you toiled over was yours. Private property led to capital accumulation, disparities of wealth, violence, subjugation, slavery. In short order, political societies “multiplied and spread over the face of the earth,” Rousseau wrote, “till hardly a corner of the world was left in which a man could escape the yoke.”

Even people who rejected his politics were captivated by his origin story. In the nineteenth century, greater empirical rigor was brought to the conjectural history that Rousseau had unfolded. A Danish archaeologist partitioned prehistory into the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages; a British one split the Stone Age into the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. For the emerging discipline of anthropology, the crucial stages were set out in Ancient Society (1877) by the American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Human beings, he concluded, had emerged from a hunter-gatherer phase of “savagery” to a sedentary “barbarian” era of agriculture, marked by the domestication of cereal grains and livestock. Technologies of agriculture advanced, writing arose, governed towns and cities coalesced, and civilization established itself. Morgan’s model of social evolution, presaged by Rousseau, became the common understanding of how political society came about.

Then came another important stage in the story of stages. In the 1930s, the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe synthesized the anthropological and archaeological findings of his predecessors: after a Paleolithic era of hunting and gathering in small bands, a Neolithic revolution saw the rise of agriculture (again, mainly harvesting cereals and herding ruminants), a soaring population, sedentism, and finally what he called the “urban revolution,” distinguished by large, dense settlements, administrative complexity, public works, hierarchy, systems of writing, and states. This basic story of social evolution has been refined and revised by later scholarship. (One recent point of emphasis is that grain, being storable and hard to hide, lent itself to taxation.) But it’s mainly taken to be—as we like to say these days—directionally correct. There was a stepwise connection, we think, between sowing cereals in our primeval past and waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity , by the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow, assails the proposition that there’s some cereals-to-states arrow of history. A mode of production, they insist, doesn’t come with a predetermined politics. Societies of hunter-gatherers could be miserably hierarchical; some indigenous American groups, fattened on foraging and fishing, had vainglorious aristocrats, patronage relationships, and slavery. Agriculturalist communities could be marvelously democratic. Societies could have big public works without farming. And cities—this is a critical point for Graeber and Wengrow—could function perfectly well without bosses and administrators.

They eloquently caution against assuming that what actually happened had to happen: in particular, that once human beings came up with agriculture, their descendants were bound to be subjects of the state. We’ve been persuaded that large-scale communities require some people to give orders and others to follow them. But that’s only because states, smothering the globe like an airborne toxic event, have promoted themselves as a natural and inevitable development. (Graeber, who died last year at fifty-nine, was, among other things, an anarchist theorist, advocate, and activist.)

Both Hobbes and Rousseau, The Dawn of Everything argues, have led us badly astray. Now, if you don’t like states, you’ll naturally be rankled by the neo-Hobbesian claim, made in books like Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), that we’re ennobled—less prone to violence and generally nicer—when we submit to centralized authority, with its endless rules and bureaucratic strictures. Yet the neo-Rousseauians aren’t a big improvement, in Graeber and Wengrow’s account, for they represent the sin of despair. It’s all very well for the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (Graeber’s Ph.D. adviser at the University of Chicago) to have talked about the superiority—moral and hedonic—of the hunting-foraging lifestyle to our own, or for Jared Diamond to have said, for similar reasons, that the agricultural revolution was a terrible mistake. The fact remains that our planet can’t sustain 7.7 billion people with hunting and foraging: there’s no going back when it comes to the rise of agriculture. If growing grain leads to governments—if it entails our submission to state power—there’s nothing much to be done; we are left to watch YouTube videos of happy !Kung people in the Kalahari and sigh over our mug of fair trade coffee.

Graeber and Wengrow reject such paralytic pessimism. They believe that social evolutionism is a con, aimed at making us think that we had no choice but to forfeit our freedom for food and that the states we find everywhere are the inexorable result of developments ten or twelve thousand years ago. The Hobbesian spin leads to pigheaded triumphalism; the Rousseauian spin leads to plaintive defeatism. In their view we should give up both and reject the inevitability of states. Maybe history doesn’t supply any edifying counterexamples—lasting, large-scale, self-governing, nondominating communities sustained by mutual aid and social equality. But, Graeber and Wengrow argue, our prehistory does. To imagine a future where we are truly free, they suggest, we need to grasp the reality of our Neolithic past—to see what nearly was ours.

The Dawn of Everything, chockablock with archaeological and ethnographic minutiae, is an oddly gripping read. Graeber, who did his fieldwork in Madagascar, was well known for his caustic wit and energetic prose, and Wengrow, too, has established himself not only as an accomplished archaeologist working in the Middle East but as a gifted and lively writer. A volume of macrohistory—even of anti-macrohistory—needs to land its points with some regularity, and Graeber and Wengrow aren’t averse to repeating themselves. But for the most part they convey a sense of stakes and even suspense. This is prose it’s easy to surrender to.

But should we surrender to its arguments? One question is how persuasive we find the book’s intellectual history, which mainly unspools from the early Enlightenment to the macrohistorians of today and tells of how consequential truths about alternate social arrangements got hidden from view. Another is how persuasive we find the book’s prehistory, in particular its parade of large-scale Neolithic communities that, Graeber and Wengrow suspect, were self-governing and nondominating. On both time scales, The Dawn of Everything is gleefully provocative.

Among its most arresting claims is that European intellectuals had no concept of social inequality before the seventeenth century because the concept was, effectively, a New World import. Indigenous voices, particularly from the Eastern Woodlands of North America, helped enlighten the Enlightenment thinkers. Graeber and Wengrow focus on a dialogue that the Baron de Lahontan, who had served with the French army in North America, published in 1703, ostensibly reproducing conversations he had during his New World sojourn with a Wendat (Huron) interlocutor he named “Adario,” based on a splendid Wendat statesman known as Kandiaronk. Graeber and Wengrow say that Kandiaronk, in his opposition to dogma, domination, and inequality, embodied what they call “the indigenous critique.” And it was immensely powerful: “For European audiences, the indigenous critique would come as a shock to the system, revealing possibilities for human emancipation that, once disclosed, could hardly be ignored.”

Mainstream historians, such as Richard White, seem inclined to think that Adario’s voice is partly Kandiaronk’s and partly Lahontan’s. Graeber and Wengrow, by contrast, maintain that (allowing for embellishment) Adario and Kandiaronk were one and the same. It’s of no consequence, they say, that Adario’s claims that his people had no concept of property, no inequality, and no laws were (as they acknowledge) simply not true of the Wendat. Nor is any weight given to the fact that Adario shares Lahontan’s anticlerical Deism, expresses specific critiques of Christian theology associated with Pierre Bayle and other early philosophes , and offers a strikingly detailed critique of the abuses of the French judiciary. If the dialogue presents no conceptually novel arguments, that’s to be expected; after all, Graeber and Wengrow say, “there are only so many logical arguments one can make, and intelligent people in similar circumstances will come up with similar rhetorical approaches.” Maybe so. Still, our understanding of the indigenous critique would have been strengthened had they tried to determine what, for its time, was and was not distinctive in this dialogue.

But then they would have had to discard the thesis that Europeans, before the Enlightenment, lacked the concept of social inequality. This claim is plainly wide of the mark. Look south, and you find that Francisco de Vitoria (circa 1486–1546), like others of the School of Salamanca, had much to say about social inequality; and he, in turn, could cite eminences like Gregory the Great, who in the sixth century insisted that all men were by nature equal, and that “to wish to be feared by an equal is to lord it over others, contrary to the natural order.” Look north, and you find the German radical Thomas Müntzer in 1525 spurring on the Great Peasants’ Revolt:

Help us in any way you can, with men and with cannon, so that we can carry out the commands of God himself in Ezekiel 14, where he says: “I will rescue you from those who lord it over you in a tyrannous way…”

A vehement opposition to domination and to social inequality was certainly part of the Radical Reformation. Consider the theory and practice, in the same period, of such Anabaptist groups as the Hutterites, among whom private property was replaced by the “community of goods” and positions of authority subject to election.

Curiously, Graeber and Wengrow even hurry past the famous Montaigne essay from 1580 that takes up an episode in which explorers brought three Tupinamba from South America to the French court. The Tupinamba marveled that people at court should defer to the diminutive King Charles IX rather than to someone they selected out of their own ranks. They further marveled, Montaigne writes, that “there were amongst us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities” while others “were begging at their doors, lean and half-starved with hunger and poverty.” The Tupinamba wondered that these unfortunates “were to suffer so great an inequality and injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set fire to their houses.” It’s as if Graeber and Wengrow feared that this indigenous critique would detract from the shock to the system they associate with Kandiaronk.

What about their positioning of Rousseau? Following Émile Durkheim and others, they insist that his how-things-turned-bad story was never meant literally; it was merely a thought experiment. It’s true that the Discourse has a sentence to that effect: “One must not take the kind of research which we enter into as the pursuit of truths of history, but solely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better fitted to clarify the nature of things than to expose their actual origin.” But more plausible interpretations—notably the one offered by the intellectual historian A.O. Lovejoy—take that disclaimer to be a publishing precaution, or what Lovejoy calls “the usual lightning-rod against ecclesiastical thunderbolts.” The account is simply too detailed (metallurgy, Rousseau hypothesizes, arose from observing volcanic lava) to think he wasn’t serious about it.

Then Graeber and Wengrow repeat the familiar line that Rousseau thought everything was great until the state arose, while Hobbes thought everything was rotten. That’s why they say that Rousseau’s version of human history, just as much as Hobbes’s, has “dire political implications”—if granaries inevitably mean governments, “the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces.”

Yet those implications don’t follow. In fact, Graeber and Wengrow have read past the fact that Rousseau and Hobbes were, on a critical point, in agreement: in the period that directly preceded the rise of the state, things were awful. Where Hobbes talked about a bellum omnium contra omnes , Rousseau invoked a “black inclination to harm one another.” You could say that Rousseau starts his story earlier than Hobbes (Lovejoy attentively counted four stages that come before political society in the Discourse , though you could draw the lines slightly differently); but the two wind up in the same place. The problem Rousseau identified is that the wealthy sold us on a rigged social compact that secured their interests at the expense of our freedom. And the solution wasn’t to return to the happy days of foraging and hunting; it was to craft a better social compact.

Graeber and Wengrow’s most significant claim, in the realm of intellectual history, is that “our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization” was “invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique”—that those grain-to-government stages represented a “conservative backlash” against the voices of freedom. They were designed to persuade us that we can’t do without obedience to centralized authority and should bloody well do as we’re told. Let’s put aside the perplexing inference that Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality , in this account, at once promulgated the indigenous critique and smothered it. When we look at prominent social evolutionists, do we find apologists for centralized authority?

Rather the opposite. “ Centralization is the tendency and the result of the institutions of arbitrary and despotic governments,” Lewis Henry Morgan maintained in his 1852 lecture “Diffusion Against Centralization,” denouncing a political order in which “property is the end and aim.” In Ancient Society, he aimed to revitalize, not neutralize, a politics of emancipation. “Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society,” he wrote.

Morgan’s tripartite scheme was revisited in Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Peaceable and productive savages, in Veblen’s telling, gave way to more predatory and less productive barbarians; the rise of property rights and state power is essentially an outgrowth of patriarchy. But Veblen was hostile to determinism of the sort he found in Marx. What he favored was not surrender to the status quo but a nonstatist version of socialism, which some scholars have labeled anarchism. V. Gordon Childe, for his part, was a socialist with syndicalist tendencies who had hopes for radically different political arrangements.

In the mid-twentieth century, when social evolutionism fell from favor among anthropologists, its most vigorous advocate in the discipline was Leslie A. White. And White—who trained Sahlins, who trained Graeber—was a socialist leery of statism. Perhaps the most notable recent rendering of the cereals-to-states story appears, with novel elaborations, in Against the Grain by James C. Scott, who’s also the author of Two Cheers for Anarchism. If this metanarrative was purpose-built to reconcile us to an impoverished status quo, it’s curious that its greatest exponents advocated political transformation.

Graeber and Wengrow could be all wrong in their intellectual history, of course, and completely right about our Neolithic past. Yet their mode of argument leans heavily on a few rhetorical strategies. One is the bifurcation fallacy, in which we are presented with a false choice of two mutually exclusive alternatives. (Either Adario is Kandiaronk or Kandiaronk has no presence in Lahontan’s dialogue.) Another is what’s sometimes called the “fallacy fallacy”: because a bad argument is made for a conclusion, the conclusion must be false; or because a bad argument has been made against a conclusion, the conclusion must be true. And the absence of evidence routinely serves as evidence of absence. Through a curious rhetorical alchemy, the argument that a claim isn’t impossible gets transmuted into an argument that the claim is true.

Graeber and Wengrow tend to introduce a conjecture with the requisite qualifications, which then fall away, like scaffolding once a building has been erected. Discussing the Mesopotamian settlement of Uruk, they caution that anything said about its governance is speculation—we can only say that it didn’t have monarchy. The absence of a royal court is consistent with all sorts of political arrangements, including rule by a bevy of high-powered families, by a managerial or military or priestly elite, by ward bosses and shifting council heads, and so on. Yet a hundred pages later, the bifurcation fallacy takes effect—there’s either a royal boss or no bosses—and we’re assured that Uruk enjoyed “at least seven centuries of collective self-rule.” A naked “what if?” conjecture has wandered off and returned in the three-piece suit of an established fact.

A similar latitude is indulged when we visit the Trypillia Megasites (4100–3300 BC) in the forest-steppe of Ukraine. The largest of these settlement areas, Taljanky, is spread over 1.3 square miles, archaeologists have discovered more than a thousand houses there, and Graeber and Wengrow tell us that the per-site population was, in some cases, probably well over 10,000 residents. “Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of ‘city’?” they ask. Because they see no evidence of centralized administration, they declare it to be “proof that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.”

Proof? An archaeologist they draw on extensively for their account, John Chapman, indicates that the headcount Graeber and Wengrow invoke is based on a discredited “ maximalist model .” Those thousand houses, he suspects, weren’t occupied at the same time. Drawing from at least nine lines of independent evidence, he concludes that these settlements weren’t anything like cities. In fact, he thinks a place like Taljanky may have been less a town than a festival site—less Birmingham than Burning Man.

A reader who does the armchair archaeology of digging through the endnotes will repeatedly encounter this sort of discordance between what the book says and what its sources say. Was Mohenjo Daro—a settlement, dating to around 2600 BC, on one side of the Indus River in Pakistan’s Sindh province—free of hierarchy and administration? “Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus valley,” Graeber and Wengrow write, and they cite research by the archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. But Kenoyer has concluded that Mohenjo Daro was likely governed as a city-state; he notes, for instance, that seals with a unicorn motif are found throughout Indus settlements and infers that they may have been used by officials “who were responsible to reinforce the economic, political and ideological aspects of the Indus ruling elite.” Why should we hesitate to dignify (or denigrate) such a place with the name “state”?

Then there’s Mashkan-shapir in Iraq, which flourished four thousand years ago. “Intensive archaeological survey,” we’re told, “revealed a strikingly even distribution of wealth” and “no obvious center of commercial or political power.” Here they’re summarizing an article by the archaeologists who excavated the site—an article that actually refers to disparities of household wealth and a “walled-off enclosure in the west, which we believe was an administrative center,” and, the archaeologists think, may have had an administrative function similar to that of palaces elsewhere. The article says that Mashkan-shapir’s commercial and administrative centers were separate; when Graeber and Wengrow present this as the claim that it may have lacked any commercial or political center, it’s as if a hairbrush has been tugged through tangled evidence to make it align with their thesis.

They spend much time on Çatalhöyük, an ancient Anatolian city, or proto-city, that was first settled around nine thousand years ago. They claim that the archaeological record yields no evidence that the place had any central authority but ample evidence that the role of women was recognized and honored. The fact that more figurines have been found representing women than men signals, they venture, “a new awareness of women’s status, which was surely based on their concrete achievements in binding together these new forms of society.” What they don’t say is that the vast majority of the figurines are of animals, including sheep, cattle, and pigs; it’s possible to be less sanguine, then, about whether female figurines establish female empowerment. You may still find yourself persuaded that a preponderance of nude women among depictions of gendered human bodies is, as Graeber and Wengrow think, evidence for a gynocentric society. Just be prepared to be flexible: when they discuss the Bronze Age culture of Minoan Crete, the fact that only males are depicted in the nude will be taken as evidence for a gynocentric society. Then there’s the fact that 95 percent of Çatalhöyük hasn’t even been excavated; any sweeping claim about its social structure is bound to be a hostage to the fortunes of the dig.

And so it goes, as we hopscotch our way around the planet. If, a generation ago, an art historian proposed that Teotihuacan was a “utopian experiment in urban life,” we will not hear much about the murals mulled over and arguments advanced by all the archaeologists who have since drawn rather different conclusions. The vista we’re offered is exhilarating, but as evidence it gains clarity through filtration. Two half-truths, alas, do not make a truth, and neither do a thousand.

Peter Marshall/Alamy Live News

David Graeber, London, 2016

Of man’s first obedience: The Dawn of History has much of interest to say about the nature of the state. But if you take it to be a stress test of mainstream prehistory, you’ll discover that its aims and its deliverances are not quite in alignment. Indeed, when the dust, or the darts, have settled, we find that Graeber and Wengrow have no major quarrel with the “standard historical meta-narrative,” at least in its more cautious iterations. “There are, certainly, tendencies in history,” they concede, and the more reputable versions of the standard account concern not inexorable rules but, precisely, tendencies: one development creates conditions that are propitious for another. After agriculture came denser settlements, cities, governments. “Over the long term,” they grant, “ours is a species that has become enslaved to its crops: wheat, rice, millet and corn feed the world, and it’s hard to envisage modern life without them.” They don’t dispute that forager societies—with fascinating exceptions—tend to have less capital accumulation and inequality than sedentary farming ones. They emphatically agree with many evolutionists of the past couple of centuries that “something did go terribly wrong in human history.”

At the same time, a wholly plausible insight flows through The Dawn of Everything. Human beings are riven with both royalist and regicidal impulses; we’re prone to erect hierarchies and prone to topple them. We can be deeply cruel and deeply caring. “The basic principles of anarchism—self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid—referred to forms of human behavior they assumed to have been around about as long as humanity,” Graeber wrote about the nineteenth-century anarchist thinkers in his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004). “The same goes for the rejection of the state and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination.”

The Dawn of Everything can be read as an effort to build out the “as long as humanity” thesis. We should readily accept that human beings routinely resist being dominated, even if they routinely seek to dominate; that self-organization, voluntary association, and mutual aid are vital forces in our social history. It’s just that Graeber and Wengrow aren’t content to make those points: they want to establish the existence of large, dense, city-like settlements free of rulers or rules; and, when the fumes of conjecture drift away, we are left without a single unambiguous example.

Whatever its empirical shortcomings, the book must be counted an imaginative success. Marx’s Capital came with an edifice of prehistorical and historical conjecture; the core tenets of Marxism do not stand or fall with it. The Dawn of Everything , too, has an argument to make that is independent of all the potsherds and all the field notes. In an era when social critique largely proceeds in the name of equality, it argues, in the mode of buoyant social prophesy, that our primary concern should, instead, be freedom, which it encapsulates as the freedom “to move, to disobey, to rearrange social ties.”

It must be said that Graeber, in books like The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018), was exactly such a social prophet: satiric, antic, enthralling. It is impossible not to mourn the loss of that voice. His vision is of particular significance because it doesn’t fit easily within the usual political positions of our era. What readers of The Dawn of Everything should not overlook is that the sort of inequality we mainly fret about today is of concern to its authors only inasmuch as it clashes with freedom. At its core is a fascinating proposal about human values, about the nature of a good and just existence. And so we can profitably approach this book with Rousseau’s disclaimer in mind: “One must not take the kind of research which we enter into as the pursuit of truths of history, but solely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better fitted to clarify the nature of things than to expose their actual origin.”

Yes, plenty of arguments can be made against Graeber and Wengrow’s anarchist vision; some double as arguments against libertarian ones. (Note, for instance, the paradoxical nature of the “freedom to disobey”: we cannot be commanded—and therefore we cannot disobey commands—without institutions that authorize command.) But these are, precisely, arguments; they could be wrong, in part or whole. They should be weighed, assessed, tested, and perhaps modified in the face of counterarguments. And the worst argument to make against anarchism—against a polity without politics—is that we haven’t quite seen it up and running yet. “If anarchist theory and practice cannot keep pace with—let alone go beyond—historic changes that have altered the entire social, cultural, and moral landscape,” the eminent anarchist Murray Bookchin wrote three decades ago, “the entire movement will indeed become what Theodor Adorno called it—a ‘ghost.’” We live in an era of the World Wide Web, same-sex marriage, artificial intelligence, a climate crisis. We don’t need to peer into our prehistoric past to decide what to think about these things.

“Pray, Mr. MacQuedy, how is it that all gentlemen of your nation begin everything they write with the ‘infancy of society?’” an epicurean reverend asks a political economist in Thomas Love Peacock’s novel Crotchet Castle (1831). This habit, so entrenched in that era, has persisted through ours. The Dawn of Everything sometimes put me in mind of Riane Eisler’s international best seller from 1987, The Chalice and the Blade. Eisler, trawling through the Neolithic, saw a once-prevalent woman-friendly “partnership” model of “gylany” being supplanted, in stages, by the “dominator” model of “androcracy.” Like Graeber and Wengrow, she had a deep antipathy toward domination; like them, she cherished a vision of freedom and mutual care; like them, she thought she glimpsed it in Minoan Crete.

But the moral argument here doesn’t depend on whether we believe that gylany was once widespread: an ancient pedigree doesn’t make patriarchy right. Social prophets, including those in the anarchist tradition—from Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman to Paul Goodman and David Graeber—make the vital contribution of stretching our social and political imagination. Facing forward, we can conduct our own experiments in living. We can devise the stages we’d like to see.

That’s what Rousseau came to think. By the time he published The Social Contract (1762), he had given up the notion that political argument needed to be buttressed by some primordial utopia. “Far from thinking that neither virtue nor happiness is available to us,” he argued, “let’s work to draw from evil the very remedy that would cure it”—let’s reorganize society, that is, through a better social compact. Never mind the dawn, he was urging: we will not find our future in our past.

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David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

The dawn of everything author left behind countless fans and a belief society could still change for the better..

new york times book review the dawn of everything

Lately it has seemed possible that everything must change. Basic fixtures of American life, rules and institutions that had come to feel inevitable — in 2020 and 2021, they felt less inevitable than before. They felt perhaps untenable. Things like the cost of health care and the cost of child care. Offices, prisons, and police. Fossil fuel, the filibuster, Facebook. The pursuit of happiness via nonstop work. The monthly payments on a student loan. Every month the rent was due — unless it wasn’t anymore.

To David Graeber, it was a matter of plain fact that things did not have to be the way they were. Graeber was an anthropologist, which meant it was his job to study other ways of living. “I’m interested in anthropology because I’m interested in human possibilities,” he once explained . Graeber was also an anarchist, “and in a way,” he went on, “there’s always been an affinity between anthropology and anarchism, simply because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible. There’s been plenty of them.” A better world was not assured, but it was possible — and anyway, as Graeber put it in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology , “since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify and reproduce the mess we have today?”

Graeber died unexpectedly a year ago this September, at the age of 59, and though he’d never sought to be a leader, he left behind a multitude of followers and fans, from artists to economists to Kurdish revolutionaries. They were people whose imaginations he had captured as a scholar and a teacher, as the public intellectual of the Occupy movement, and as the best-selling author of Debt and Bullshit Jobs , books that swept across eras and disciplines to offer scholarly provocation in layperson’s terms. After his death, friends and acolytes from around the world — from Brazil, Japan, and New Zealand — submitted video tributes for an online celebration of his life. A year later, his widow, the artist Nika Dubrovsky, still hasn’t managed to make her way through all the footage she received.

Graeber also left behind the staggeringly large project he finished three weeks before he died: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity . Written in collaboration with the archaeologist David Wengrow, the book draws on new research to challenge received wisdom on civilization’s course. The story of humanity, as it is typically told, proceeds along a linear path. It passes in distinct stages from foraging bands and tribes on to agriculture, cities, and kings. But, surveying the historic and archaeological record, Graeber and Wengrow saw a wealth of other stories, taking humanity on varied and unpredictable routes. There were societies that farmed without really committing to it, for example. There were societies whose authority figures’ power applied only during certain parts of the year. Cities coalesced without any apparent centralized government; brutal hierarchies took shape among people who later reversed their course. The book’s 704 pages teem with possibilities. They are a testament, in the authors’ view, to human agency and invention — a capacity for conscious political decision-making that conventional history ignores. “We are projects of collective self-creation,” write Graeber and Wengrow. “What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such?”

Lauren Leve, an anthropologist at UNC-Chapel Hill who was Graeber’s girlfriend for many years and, later, his friend, remembers his crackling enthusiasm for his work on The Dawn of Everything . “We would be on the phone, and I could just hear him sort of wringing his hands and grinning with excitement and a sense of mischief — ‘This is going to mess things up!’” she recalls. He’d laugh as he described the discoveries he and Wengrow were making, the revelations they planned to unleash. People are just going to go crazy, he would tell her, but it’s true!

In 1975, David Graeber arrived at Phillips Academy Andover as a tenth-grader — a “lower,” in the boarding school’s parlance. He was 14 and a stranger to Wasp aristocracy, a child of proudly working-class New York. His mother, Ruth Rubinstein, had met Kenneth Graeber at a communist youth camp; he was a Gentile from Kansas and, when they married, her Jewish immigrant family disowned her. Kenneth worked as a plate stripper for printing presses, and Ruth sewed brassieres. During the 1930s, he’d joined the International Brigade and driven an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War. She, meanwhile, performed in Pins and Needles , a union-backed musical that brought its garment-worker cast to Broadway. (After its run, she returned to sewing bras.) Ruth’s big number, “Chain Store Daisy,” concerned a Vassar graduate selling girdles at Macy’s. Ruth herself never went to college. She was a constant reader, however, and years later, she was the audience her son kept in mind when he wrote. Graeber, Leve recalls, used to say that “if he understood something, he should be able to write it in a way that would be accessible and interesting to her.”

Ruth and Kenneth were in their 40s by the time they had David, their second son, and the family had achieved a measure of security. Early in his childhood, they moved into an apartment in the Penn South co-ops, an affordable-housing development in Chelsea sponsored by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. The family had a tiny A-frame beach house on Fire Island with bookshelves full of sci-fi paperbacks. (One of Graeber’s first memories of political engagement was a late-’60s antiwar march on the beach.) After developing a youthful hobby of translating Mayan hieroglyphics, he began a correspondence with an archaeology professor at Yale, who helped arrange an Andover scholarship. The sudden immersion of a brilliant, observant, and class-conscious adolescent in the world of prep school would seem to be excellent training for a radical anthropologist.

Graeber’s education continued at SUNY-Purchase and the University of Chicago, where he got his anthropology Ph.D. His adviser, the eminent scholar Marshall Sahlins, suggested that fieldwork in Madagascar might suit him; Graeber spent nearly two years there on the research that became his dissertation, and eventually his book, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar. The ambition for ethnography he set out in its preface was to “give access to a universe, a total way of life.” Thomas Blom Hansen is chair of the Anthropology Department at Stanford; a friend and onetime colleague, he told me Graeber had always been interested in the “large, universal questions” of their discipline’s early days.

What Graeber came to realize, during his time with the Malagasy, was that their daily lives carried on effectively outside state control. They weren’t paying taxes, they weren’t calling police, and, rather than relying on hierarchical structures of authority, they were making decisions collectively. The Malagasy didn’t call attention to this state of affairs. They just went about their business, behaving — as anarchist principles would have it — as if they were already free. Graeber had considered himself an anarchist since he was a teen, but now he could see how anarchism worked. “The way I always put it is: Most people don’t think anarchism is a bad idea; they think it’s insane,” he told one interviewer. “I come from a family where that was not assumed.” Still, before Madagascar, “I never actually lived in a place without state authority,” Graeber explained. “I got to observe firsthand how people can actually organize things without top-down structures of command.”

The quotidian anarchism Graeber saw in his fieldwork was an epiphany he would later work to translate for a wider audience. Anarchism was a matter of “having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions,” he wrote in an essay called “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!” He explained that when people waited politely in line to board a bus — waited, that is, even though nobody was making them — they were acting like anarchists.

This carefully palatable account of anarchism notwithstanding, Graeber spoke out over the years in defense of anarchist activity more alarming to some observers, like Black Bloc actions that damaged property. He was not trying to soften his politics for popular appeal, exactly. Rather, he was challenging accepted fictions and revealing how they diverged from reality. Such a fiction might be “The government is in charge here.” It might also be “Human beings are fundamentally selfish and act accordingly.” To unthinkingly accept the latter worldview, for example, we blind ourselves to “at least half of our own activity, which could just as easily be described as being communistic or anarchistic,” Graeber explained . A basic optimism about humanity united Graeber’s politics and his anthropology: The problem, in his view, was the tendency not to give people enough credit.

Teaching at Yale, where he started as an assistant professor in 1998, was not a job that Graeber expected to last. “David was open about it,” Leve said. Knowing that tenure offers at Yale were rare, he intended to treat it as “the best temporary job you could ever have.” At the time, associate and assistant roles were not so much pathways to tenure as short-term contract jobs. The result was a sharp sense of division between the senior faculty and their precariously employed junior colleagues. The anthropologist Kamari Clarke (now a professor at the University of Toronto) was hired as an assistant professor at the same time as Graeber. She remembers how the department’s hierarchies permeated daily life. “We had faculty meetings, and junior faculty were there for the first, say, 45 minutes, and then we would be asked to leave,” Clarke said. “And then senior faculty would continue on with the meeting. That was the Yale way during that period.”

In Graeber’s classroom, such questions of status had little weight. Even the big-name theorists he discussed — in Graeber’s telling, “they were just dudes,” said Durba Chattaraj. One of his Ph.D. students at Yale, she remembers lectures speckled with the personal foibles of the greats. Apart from the entertainment value, there was a message: These thinkers “were smart, but they were doing something that anybody can do if they read enough and think hard enough, which is creating theories about the world around you.”

“To be honest, meeting David was kind of like meeting another student — he wasn’t all that much older than us,” said Christina Moon, who was an anthropology Ph.D. student at the time. Graeber would join the graduate students for Buffy TV nights; he’d take them out to dinner and pick up the check. His office was crowded with rugs, old lamps, tchotchkes, and piles of papers and books. “Crap! All of this crap everywhere,” Moon fondly recalled. “It was messy, but it was this warm little place within a very stoic and cold-feeling institution.” She and Graeber bonded over their family roots in the Garment District: Her parents had once worked at a factory on 23rd Street, not far from his family’s ILGWU apartment on 24th. Moon often felt like an outsider at Yale. As her adviser, Graeber became “a refuge,” she told me, someone who helped her “overcome those feelings that I didn’t belong.”

Graeber saw himself as an outsider at Yale, too — despite publishing at a daunting clip, despite teaching classes that were reliably packed. Being an anthropologist meant being attuned to the meanings a community built into its structures. At Yale, to someone who’d grown up without much money, the meanings were clear. Clarke remembers him talking about going to Sterling Memorial Library and “feeling freaked out by the grandeur.” Sterling is a massive Gothic Revival tower; its vast hush and soaring ceilings are the academy’s fantasy of itself made manifest. It is a building that invites the visitor to revere that fantasy, in all its storied elitism — but Graeber resisted doing so. He had parents who had embraced their working-class identity; he embraced it, too. “He didn’t want to give that up completely. He didn’t think he should have to give it up completely,” Leve said. Trying to ingratiate his way to insider status would have felt like a betrayal — “but,” she said, “mostly it was just that he didn’t know how.” Graeber was “ unclubbable ,” a colleague he considered an ally once told him. “His affect was so disorganized,” Leve told me. He looked different from the other professors. His hair was untidy; his clothes were perpetually disheveled; he was ashamed of his terrible teeth.

Graeber had just delivered a lecture for the class Power, Violence, and Cosmology one day in 1999 when a headline about the Seattle WTO protests caught his eye. “I discovered the political movement I’d really like to have existed had come into being when I wasn’t paying attention,” he later said . Here was a practical enactment of the principles he’d long embraced. He wound up taking a sabbatical year, during which he immersed himself in the global justice movement with New York City’s Direct Action Network. DAN was part of a loosely organized national activist confederation that had come to prominence after Seattle. It operated along anarchist principles, making decisions through a consensus process and planning actions through spokes-councils and affinity groups. It was just like Madagascar — albeit “much more formalized and explicit,” he’d later write, since “in Madagascar, everyone had been doing this since they learned to speak.”

Just as he had in Madagascar, Graeber was taking extensive field notes on the customs he observed: how the activists defused their conflicts, how they shared their cigarettes. The London School of Economics sociology professor Ayça Çubukçu remembers meeting Graeber through DAN at a community center on the Lower East Side. She was impressed with the work that would become his book Direct Action: An Ethnography . The social sciences tend to rely on “this distinction between the subject of analysis and the object of analysis — and David exploded that distinction,” Çubukçu told me. “His method was classical in the sense that he was teasing out the implicit logics and the symbolic worlds of activists. But the reason he had such an intimate understanding was because he was one of us.” Soon Graeber was helping organize actions and speaking on behalf of DAN in the press. “Yes, it’s fun,” he told a Boston Globe reporter, regarding the spirit of camaraderie at the 2000 Republican-convention protests. “We believe politics should be fun, but this is also serious. We are facing police records and getting our faces smashed in.”

When he returned to Yale after his sabbatical, previously friendly members of the senior faculty froze him out, he said . He believed that his outspoken activism had turned colleagues against him. Meanwhile, graduate students were working to organize a union, a fight that grew increasingly intense. Approached by student organizers, Graeber quickly offered his support ; many colleagues did not. He saw hypocrisy in the academy’s supposed radicalism. As he wrote in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology:

Academics love Michel Foucault’s argument that identifies knowledge and power, and insists that brute force is no longer a major factor in social control. They love it because it flatters them: the perfect formula for people who like to think of themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other people in an institutional environment. Of course, if any of these academics were to walk into their university library to consult some volume of Foucault without having remembered to bring a valid ID, and decided to enter the stacks anyway, they would soon discover that brute force is really not so far away as they like to imagine — a man with a big stick, trained in exactly how hard to hit people with it, would rapidly appear to eject them.

It was becoming apparent that the principles at the crux of Graeber’s work ill suited the academy. He didn’t believe in hierarchy, and he behaved accordingly. Whatever his beliefs, however, his colleagues still had power over him. Graeber’s first contract renewal passed uneventfully. At his second, a group of colleagues moved not to renew him, saying he’d done insufficient committee work. His failure to live in New Haven full time had further marked him as an outsider — but Graeber’s family had been pulling him back to New York. His older brother was dying of cancer, and then, following a series of mini-strokes, his mother’s health was in decline. Struggling to balance his work obligations with caring for her “was awful,” Leve told me. “It was just utterly awful.” Graeber agreed to take on more departmental work, and Yale made the unusual decision to revisit the contract in one year’s time.

Then, in 2005, Graeber joined Moon, his advisee, in a contentious meeting. Moon was one of the students involved in the organizing effort among grad students, which had become a source of friction, and she was pursuing a dissertation that seemed to perplex some senior faculty. She wanted to study emergent forms of labor in the U.S. garment industry. “Her work was brilliant, but it didn’t fit the old-school configuration of anthropological work,” Clarke, who also taught Moon, told me. Moon felt there had already been “passive-aggressive” efforts to nudge her out of the program, but in this meeting the conflict came to a head. One of the senior faculty, she remembers, told her she didn’t belong at Yale. Graeber spoke up, outraged on her behalf. “He pulled out his notebook, and he said, ‘Keep on talking. Now I’m going to start writing down every single thing you’re saying to my student.’” Moon was crying — she was terrified her academic career was over. Graeber started making jokes, stage-whispering asides, “giggling in anger” as he read back what was being said. “He just sucked all the power out of the room,” Moon said. Don’t be afraid of them, she felt he was telling her. They are ridiculous.

Moon stayed on at Yale and got her doctorate; she is now a professor at the New School. For Graeber, though, the meeting marked a turning point. “After that my dismissal was a foregone conclusion,” he later wrote . Yale’s decision not to renew Graeber’s contract attracted widespread attention — there were stories in the New York Times and the AP. Anthropologists from across the country and abroad sent letters in support of his work; Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics called Graeber ”the best anthropological theorist of his generation.”

Given this outpouring, Graeber believed he’d be able to find another job, but after applying for more than 20 positions, he failed to make the first cut for any of them. “Once you’ve been at the center of a scandal, you’re scandalous,” Leve told me. Graeber believed Yale’s decision was about politics. “Whether the man was a good anthropologist — that was indisputable,” Hansen said. “It was more a question of whether he was someone you could see as your future colleague.” Hiring a figure like Graeber would have meant “bringing in somebody who’s going to have a great deal of weight in the department and in departmental politics,” Leve explained. “And if you’re not sure that this is going to be an ally, or you think this is somebody that could complicate things, I think a lot of people may hesitate.”

When Ruth Graeber died in 2006, her son was still out of work. Invited that year to deliver a lecture at the London School of Economics, he spoke about the crushing bureaucracy that accompanied the end of life. He described it as a series of ” dead zones ” that stifled the human imagination, leaving only blindness and stupidity. Back in New York, he continued to live in the apartment where he’d grown up. “It was like a mausoleum, full of things that had belonged to his parents that he didn’t want to change or part with,” Leve said. The interiors remained a mid-century cocoon of orange, green, brown, and burgundy. Paintings by his parents’ friends hung on the walls; books that they had read lined the shelves. The apartment was a boon — a large two-bedroom in Manhattan — that Graeber shared lavishly. Friends, along with their partners and children, moved in for months or years rent free. As Graeber began teaching at Goldsmith’s in London, he was an intermittent roommate.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Graeber maintained an extended community of friends. He was an extravagant correspondent, a sender of pages-long emails. “I don’t know how it was humanly possible to have so many intimate relationships,” Çubukçu said. “At any point, he was dealing with multiple personal crises that his wide network of friends were going through.” The journalist Dyan Neary, a friend who lived for a time in the apartment, remembers Graeber as a constant visitor during the months she spent in the NICU following her daughter’s birth. He’d bring jelly candies and distract her with stories from the new book he was working on — Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

In a typical economics textbook, money gets invented because it is annoying to trade your chickens for your neighbor’s cows. Maybe you don’t want a cow when your neighbor needs some chickens; maybe what you want is shoes instead. Money: the solution to barter’s woes. Barter leads to money leads to banking and credit; this is “the founding myth of our system of economic relations,” Graeber wrote in Debt . There was, however, one notable problem. “There’s no evidence that it ever happened.” His fellow anthropologists had been “complaining about the Myth of Barter for almost a century,” and still it persisted — despite the fact that “to this day, no one has been able to locate a part of the world where the ordinary mode of economic transaction between neighbors takes the form of ‘I’ll give you 20 chickens for that cow.’”

And why would it? Such a scenario presupposes bizarre neighbors—detached from any kind of ongoing social existence, operating as economic automatons. Realistically, if you have cows and I have chickens, I give you a chicken and we say you owe me one. (Next week, maybe I come by and ask for milk.) People have always run tabs and relied on credit. More than that, they have always lived in webs of mutual dependence and obligation; the life of any community was threaded through with debts of different sorts. But debt changes when it breaks loose from actual human relations, when it becomes an impersonal asset to be bought and sold. This, Graeber wrote, was what had happened in our recent economic history. Debt had long served to shore up hierarchy, but lately, debt had also come to be treated as immutable. We’d lost what had once been the natural partner of debt: the possibility of forgiveness.

In his scholarly work, Graeber had studied value theory, asking how societies determine what is worthy and desirable — qualities more capacious than the field of economics would suggest. In Debt , he translated those questions for ordinary readers, yoking them to a contemporary problem of undeniable urgency. “I devoured that book,” the artist Thomas Gokey told me. Gokey’s work had dealt with debt in the past, so he’d done plenty of reading on the subject, and plenty of that reading was dull. “But when he wrote about it, it was lively. It’s about your relationship with your mother, it’s about your relationship with the gods — the entire cosmos is wrapped up in this thing that was also this absolutely brutal club that was just banging us over the head.”

The book arrived in the summer of 2011: after the bank bailout, after the subprime-mortgage crisis, as the effects of the Great Recession dragged on. It found many readers as eager as Gokey to understand the brutality of debt. That summer, a collection of activists began meeting in New York to plan an occupation in the Financial District. Graeber was among them. “We have a genuine horizontal structure up and running and it’s really fun (for geeks like me anyway),” he wrote in an email to a friend, the activist and writer Astra Taylor. “We wrested control from the WWP/ISO (did I mention this?) and even though it’s a silly Adbusters action we have to work with, it’s looking like the action might work out.” That fall, when Taylor showed up in the first days of Occupy Wall Street, she remembers Graeber greeting her like “a radical maître d’.”

“One thing that always struck me about David,” she told me, “is how much he enjoyed meetings.” Under the fluorescent lights of a church basement or at Zuccotti Park, Graeber was in his element. He seemed “almost gleefully” to savor the experience of being in a group doing direct democracy. The model of activism he’d first embraced ten years earlier (with consensus decision-making, many working groups, a leaderless general assembly) was attracting new attention with Occupy Wall Street — frequently, in the mainstream media, it was attracting skeptical condescension. But to Graeber, its structureless fluidity was the point. “He had an infinite patience for the frustrating aspects of that type of culture,” Taylor said. “He was really comfortable sitting there cross-legged and just listening, letting other people speak. He did not dominate. He never pulled rank.” As the guiding intellect of a horizontal, egalitarian movement, Graeber played a slightly paradoxical role. Bloomberg Businessweek hailed him as “ the anti-leader of Occupy Wall Street .” When given credit for the slogan “We Are the 99 Percent,” Graeber declined to accept; he’d said something about 99 percent, he explained , but “two Spanish indignados and a Greek anarchist added the ‘we’ and later a food-not-bombs veteran put the ‘are’ between them.” (The only reason he wasn’t naming his collaborators, he added, was “the way Police Intelligence has been coming after early OWS organizers.”)

Andrew Ross is a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU and the author of Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal . “There’s a brilliance of a certain kind of philosopher that weaves incredibly dense — you know, Heidegger or something. David was the absolute antithesis of that,” he said. “He’s the kind of guy that will sit in a park and change your life.” And with Occupy, for many, Graeber did. Nicholas Mirzoeff, an NYU media-studies professor, met Graeber during this period. “There are certain people whose generosity makes you be the best version of yourself,” Mirzoeff said. “He would see something that you would say, and say, ‘That’s so interesting,’ and just ever-so-slightly recast it to make it a good deal smarter than maybe it necessarily originally was.” It was a tendency that seemed to spring from genuine curiosity about other people.. “I hesitate to use the word ‘empowerment,’” Çubukçu told me, “but he empowered people.”

In his 2013 book The Democracy Project , Graeber held that Occupy had “worked,” and the experience of Zuccotti Park left his enthusiasm for direct democracy undimmed. Others remembered the day-to-day reality with less warmth. “There’s this phrase, ‘Freedom is an endless meeting,’ and it’s not meant as a positive phrase,” Taylor said. “He just had really rose-colored glasses.” But whatever its frustrations, Occupy was the arena where ideas that later took hold much more broadly emerged. Gokey was part of an Occupy listserv where one day, he remembers, Graeber sent a message “that didn’t make sense to me” — something about secondary markets and buying up medical debts to forgive. “A week later I went back and reread it and I thought, Certainly this can’t be true ,” Gokey told me. But he was intrigued enough to investigate further. The suggestion sent him deep into research on a “world where people’s pain is other people’s investment opportunities.” In time he had the beginnings of a strategy for a modern debt jubilee.

Graeber’s ability to forge connections was an asset in organizing — Strike Debt grew out of Occupy Wall Street, eventually uniting Gokey, Ross, Taylor, and other Graeber allies. ”It’s like he put a band together,” Taylor said. The members of the group realized they could purchase strangers’ high-risk loans for pennies on the dollar. Then, instead of trying to collect on the loans (as another investor would), they forgave them and sent the borrowers letters telling them they were free. In an early video produced by the group, Graeber and his friends burn collection notices and dance, their faces hidden behind balaclavas. Wrote Graeber in the video’s voice-over script: “Every dollar we take from a subprime mortgage speculator, every dollar we save from the collection agency is a tiny piece of our own lives and freedom that we can give back to our communities.”

By the end of 2013, the group had raised some $400,000 and used it to forgive nearly $15 million in loans. This was, of course, an infinitesimal fraction of the problem. But their goal (in addition to helping those they could) was to change the way people thought about debt. In The Democracy Project, Graeber discussed how, “in the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate.” In this sense, Strike Debt — which forgave some $32 million, before shifting its focus to collective action as a debtors union — succeeded to a staggering degree. “During Occupy, we made a demand for full student-debt cancellation and to fully fund public universities,” Gokey told me. “We were ridiculed by everyone. By the media, by politicians, by the knowing, smug policy wonks.” At the time, their goals were treated as self-evidently absurd: “They want all student debt in the country forgiven. All $1 trillion of it. And if the government would be so kind, they’d appreciate it if it would pay for higher education from here on out, as well,” one Reuters commentator wrote.

Ten years later, a figure as unimpeachably Establishment as Chuck Schumer was calling for the forgiveness of student debt. Bernie Sanders had brought free college to the presidential stage in 2016, and by 2020, Democratic presidential candidates were arguing less over whether debt forgiveness was a good idea than over precisely how much to forgive. The safe-choice centrist who won the primary and then the presidency, Joe Biden, made free college access part of his platform. In one of her recent calls to cancel student loans, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed supporters to the Debt Collective, Strike Debt’s debtors-union successor. Full forgiveness may not be a political reality yet, but the terms of debate have changed.

In the years surrounding Occupy, Graeber was teaching in London, but he continued to see New York as his home. Then, in 2014, he lost his foothold in the city: the family apartment. Back in 2006, as his mother was dying, they’d tried to get him added to the lease. The paperwork had never gone through. Graeber remained in the apartment for years with no objection, but after Occupy, the co-op asked him to leave. He believed the timing suggested police interference. “ Almost everyone mentioned in press as involved in early days of OWS has been getting administrative harassment,” he tweeted. “ Evictions , visa problems, tax audits … Endless minor harassment arrests.”

Though he was perhaps slow to embrace it, London was where Graeber “really became the person he wanted to be,” Moon told me. After teaching for a time at Goldsmiths, he was hired as a full professor at LSE, an “institution that gives a little more space for people who fit into that classic public-intellectual mode,” as Hansen put it. Graeber still chafed against workplace habit — running late to meetings, avoiding his office phone — but he found a community of colleagues who welcomed him. He settled down in an apartment near Portobello Road, getting to know neighborhood shopkeepers and perusing the street market on weekends. When friends visited, he’d introduce them around, maybe take them to a local bookseller’s reggae band or go shopping for vintage clothes. Dubrovsky, who became his partner in London, remembers visits to their local coffee shop. “Every time we went in, David would have a chat about the merits of different kinds of ground coffee with a lovely employee,” she recalled . “Every time, he bought the same type of ground coffee.”

Dubrovsky and Graeber were friends and correspondents for years before they got together. The emails he sent were so extensive that she was sure at first she was “his major pen pal.” Soon she came to see that in fact he managed to send a great many people such long and thoughtful emails. (She later realized that he slept roughly five hours a night.) One of Graeber’s other correspondents was Wengrow, an archaeologist at University College London. They met in professional circles and struck up a rapport after Graeber impressed him with his knowledge of Mesopotamian cylinder seals. Wengrow gave Graeber a copy of his book; Graeber read it and wrote him “this extraordinary email,” pages of ideas and feedback, Wengrow remembers, “and I thought, Wow, this is really fun! ” He replied, the emails grew longer, and they had “probably written half a book” before they officially decided to collaborate on what would become The Dawn of Everything . Their plan was to pursue it strictly “in a spirit of fun,” as a respite from their other work. It was how Graeber liked to approach writing generally, said Dubrovsky. He’d write propped up in the bathtub or lying on the floor; that way, it didn’t feel like work.

He and Wengrow were serious in a certain sense: They were determined to publish extracts in peer-reviewed journals, to establish scholarly credibility. When they made their first submission, to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute , they received brief comments dismissing their work as insufficiently “new.” Graeber was immediately distressed, convinced the anonymous reviewers had “some ax to grind.” Wengrow managed to calm him down while he replied on their behalf. Politely, Wengrow asked for examples of where exactly work like theirs had appeared before. The Journal was unable to produce any. It accepted the paper. Graeber was amazed. “How do you do that?” Wengrow remembers him marveling. “The man did not know how to handle stress,” another friend told me. A heated exchange on Twitter could derail him. Still, he refused to shy away. One persistent bugbear was the Berkeley economist Brad DeLong — after DeLong’s blog took him to task for a handful of factual errors in Debt , the two became entrenched in a protracted flamewar. (DeLong recently resurfaced , amid positive press for The Dawn of Everything , to affirm his stance that “nothing David Graeber writes is trustable.”)

But some economists (not Brad DeLong) embraced Debt ; proponents of modern monetary theory saw him as an influence. Bullshit Jobs , another best seller, found language and theory for another widespread ill — meaningless work — and further expanded his readership. Chattaraj, Graeber’s Yale student, told me that the undergraduates she teaches as a professor at Ashoka University in India now come to her fired up to discuss the book. Graeber had new professional stability and new audiences, and he was conscious of the power his stature gave him to wield. “He had, in a way, very practical politics,” Taylor said. The goal, as he saw it, was to make people’s lives better. “Sometimes you do that by opening people’s imaginations, changing their self-understanding. Sometimes you can actually change policy — give people some fucking health care.”

It was in that spirit that he became a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. “I am not a political party guy,” Graeber told one interviewer . “The reason I support Corbyn, or am happy about him, is because he is willing to work with social movements.” Graeber had struck up a connection with John McDonnell, Corbyn’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer, through the People’s Parliament, an effort to bring ordinary Britons into the workings of government. James Schneider, who served as Corbyn’s communications director, said that Graeber was someone “sparking the imagination for what’s politically possible,” opening space for new ideas beyond positions the party was able to take. He was also a forceful ally in political fights. When the Labour Party faced accusations of anti-Semitism, Graeber recorded a video in Corbyn’s defense.

In a talk at the London Review Bookshop, Graeber described changing one’s mind as a kind of “political happiness” — the pleasure of realizing that you don’t have to keep thinking the things you’ve thought before. “I’m absolutely certain that for him to throw in so profoundly with an electoral campaign was a big deal,” Taylor told me. At the same time, “It’s not like he was a quiescent supporter of ours,” Schneider said. “He would challenge, he would push.”

One of the causes for which Graeber pushed was Rojava, and the Kurdish political project under way in northern Syria. Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, held prisoner by the Turkish government, had undergone a political conversion after reading the work of American anarchist Murray Bookchin. Where once Ocalan had been a fairly conventional leader of a conventional Marxist party, he was now urging his followers to look beyond such structure. Rojava, the Kurdish word meaning “West,” came to identify an autonomous region in northern Syria where the Kurds embarked on an experiment in local democratic government and cooperative economy with guiding principles that included equality for women and ecological responsibility.

For Graeber, the Kurdish project (and the wider world’s indifference) called to mind the Spanish Civil War. The revolution his father had been moved to defend had brought about “whole cities under directly democratic management, industries under worker control, and the radical empowerment of women,” he wrote in the Guardian . But the Fascists had crushed the Spanish Republic, and now ISIS menaced the Kurds. “I feel it’s incumbent on me, as someone who grew up in a family whose politics were in many ways defined by the Spanish revolution, to say: we cannot let it end the same way again,” Graeber wrote. As an anarchist, he had a certain discomfort with the portraits of Ocalan that were everywhere in Rojava, Graeber told one interviewer — but a leader in jail for life was a leader he could tolerate.

Elif Sarican, a Kurdish activist and anthropologist, said that Graeber was “one of the first big names” to visit Rojava. “He was always so clear on the strategic and political importance of defending this revolution,” she told me. “He would say, ‘It’s not to say it’s perfect, and they’re not claiming it’s perfect themselves, but this is an objectively crucial and historic revolutionary situation happening, and we need to put our weight behind it.’” Debbie Bookchin, a journalist and Murray’s daughter, remembers discussing his plans for a quick 2019 trip to New York: He and Dubrovsky were getting married at City Hall, and he wanted Bookchin to attend. “I said, ‘Great! And by the way, while you’re here, how do you feel about doing a panel on Rojava?’” she told me and laughed. “Anybody else would have said, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m flying in for four days. I’m going to have jet lag. I’m getting married. And now you’re asking me to do this?’ David, without a beat of hesitation, said, ‘Of course, absolutely.’ And of course, because David was on the program, we had an overflowing crowd.”

As part of international delegations traveling in support of the region, Graeber ate falafel amid ruins in Raqqa. He smoked his one annual cigarette (he’d been a heavy smoker in his youth) with Yazidi women fighters while visiting a training base. He had a tendency, sometimes exasperating to fellow travelers, of wandering off unannounced. One time he’d “gone for a wander” only to be found at a kiosk buying candy for Kurdish children, Sarican recalled. Visiting archaeological sites in Rojava, Graeber sent Wengrow exuberant texts about their book — years into their project, the two were still having fun. Indeed, they were still having fun after ten years, at which point the book was essentially complete. “We both found it too depressing — the idea of actually finishing,” Wengrow told me. Yet the conclusion had begun to sprawl. In August 2020, they called the book finished; they decided to continue in a sequel.

Pandemic life in London had been a challenge for Graeber: He was constitutionally averse to quarantine. “It was tough for David to abide by the rules of isolation, not go to the cafés, not meet with neighbors,” Dubrovsky recalled . He hated wearing masks. Early in 2020, they’d both felt sick but couldn’t get tested; out of loyalty to the NHS, he refused to see a private doctor, even as his symptoms dragged on. As the summer ended, Çubukçu was finishing a book review. She sent a draft and he wrote back right away. He told her that he’d read it, that he was on the train to Venice, and that he wasn’t feeling well at all.

He hoped, in somewhat the manner of a Victorian invalid, that the trip might improve his health. He’d been nursing “strange symptoms” for months, Dubrovsky remembers : aches, exhaustion, tingling fingers, a soapy taste in his mouth. But then: “He was never really in tip-top shape, from the moment I knew him,” Sarican pointed out. She was one of the friends who met Dubrovsky and Graeber in Venice, and on their second day, a group went to the beach. Graeber was eager to swim. “We were just being silly, jumping through the waves,” Sarican remembers. Graeber was saying how much it was like Fire Island, although the waves were bigger on Fire Island, he thought. “He just kept talking about his childhood in a way that I never really remembered David doing so much,” Sarican told me. “He spoke about his childhood quite a bit that day.”

After a walk and some ice cream, Graeber retreated to a café. When Sarican returned from one last swim, “he just seemed very unwell” — sweating profusely and in pain. She assumed he was having a bad reaction to something that he had eaten, but the paramedics, when they arrived, seemed more concerned. As he rode to the hospital, Dubrovsky followed behind in a cab; COVID regulations were in effect. She waited hours in an empty hall of the Ospedale SS Giovanni E Paolo for news. She called her adult daughter, who spoke a little Italian, and who did her best to translate what Dubrovsky was told. A scan had discovered internal bleeding, and doctors were preparing Graeber for surgery when he went into cardiac arrest. “He was joking with me,” Dubrovsky remembered — saying that things weren’t really so bad, that he’d be fine — “and then suddenly the doctors said he died.” The autopsy found that his cause of death was internal bleeding caused by pancreatitis necrosis. Later, the ER doctor who’d treated him told Dubrovsky that the condition could be triggered by a virus — perhaps COVID, but there was no way to know.

Graeber had been working on a short essay about COVID that was published after his death. The pandemic was “a confrontation with the actual reality of human life,” he wrote. “Which is that we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated.” Surely it was the moment to stop taking such a state of affairs for granted, he wrote. “Why don’t we stop treating it as entirely normal that the more obviously one’s work benefits others, the less one is likely to be paid for it; or insisting that financial markets are the best way to direct long-term investment even as they are propelling us to destroy most life on Earth?”

This was not so different from things Graeber had been writing for years, but now it seemed more people were saying the same thing. Value and vulnerability and how each was assessed: the familiar understanding no longer served. Circumstance demanded the supposedly impossible.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

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Guest Essay

Ancient History Shows How We Can Create a More Equal World

By David Graeber and David Wengrow

Mr. Graeber and Mr. Wengrow are the authors of the forthcoming book, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,” from which this essay is adapted. Mr. Graeber died shortly after completing the book.

M ost of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but we have next to no idea what was happening for the majority of that time. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 B.C. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during that period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were. This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to. Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly — the reasons for war, greed, exploitation and indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?

One of the first people to ask this question in the modern era was the Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in an essay on the origins of social inequality that he submitted to a competition in 1754. Once upon a time, he wrote, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a state of childlike innocence, as equals. These bands of foragers could be egalitarian because they were isolated from one another, and their material needs were simple. According to Rousseau, it was only after the agricultural revolution and the rise of cities that this happy condition came to an end. Urban living meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling out forms.

Rousseau lost the essay competition, but the story he told went on to become a dominant narrative of human history, laying the foundations upon which contemporary “big history” writers — such as Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama and Yuval Noah Harari — built their accounts of how our societies evolved. These writers often talk about inequality as the natural result of living in larger groups with a surplus of resources. For example, Mr. Harari writes in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” that, after the advent of agriculture, rulers and elites sprang up “everywhere … living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.”

For a long time, the archaeological evidence — from Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica and elsewhere — did appear to confirm this. If you put enough people in one place, the evidence seemed to show, they would start dividing themselves into social classes. You could see inequality emerge in the archaeological record with the appearance of temples and palaces, presided over by rulers and their elite kinsmen, and storehouses and workshops, run by administrators and overseers. Civilization seemed to come as a package: It meant misery and suffering for those who would inevitably be reduced to serfs, slaves or debtors, but it also allowed for the possibility of art, technology, and science.

That makes wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense: Yes, living in a truly egalitarian society might be possible if you’re a Pygmy or a Kalahari Bushman. But if you want to live in a city like New York, London or Shanghai — if you want all the good things that come with concentrations of people and resources — then you have to accept the bad things, too. For generations, such assumptions have formed part of our origin story. The history we learn in school has made us more willing to tolerate a world in which some can turn their wealth into power over others, while others are told their needs are not important and their lives have no intrinsic worth. As a result, we are more likely to believe that inequality is just an inescapable consequence of living in large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated societies.

We want to offer an entirely different account of human history. We believe that much of what has been discovered in the last few decades, by archaeologists and others in kindred disciplines, cuts against the conventional wisdom propounded by modern “big history” writers. What this new evidence shows is that a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized along robustly egalitarian lines. In some regions, we now know, urban populations governed themselves for centuries without any indication of the temples and palaces that would later emerge; in others, temples and palaces never emerged at all, and there is simply no evidence of a class of administrators or any other sort of ruling stratum. It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and never did. Far from resigning us to inequality, the new picture that is now emerging of humanity’s deep past may open our eyes to egalitarian possibilities we otherwise would have never considered.

W herever cities emerged, they defined a new phase of world history. Settlements inhabited by tens of thousands of people made their first appearance around 6,000 years ago. The conventional story goes that cities developed largely because of advances in technology: They were a result of the agricultural revolution, which set off a chain of developments that made it possible to support large numbers of people living in one place. But in fact, one of the most populous early cities appeared not in Eurasia — with its many technical and logistical advantages — but in Mesoamerica, which had no wheeled vehicles or sailing ships, no animal-powered transport and much less in the way of metallurgy or literate bureaucracy. In short, it’s easy to overstate the importance of new technologies in setting the overall direction of change.

Almost everywhere, in these early cities, we find grand, self-conscious statements of civic unity, the arrangement of built spaces in harmonious and often beautiful patterns, clearly reflecting some kind of planning at the municipal scale. Where we do have written sources (ancient Mesopotamia, for example), we find large groups of citizens referring to themselves simply as “the people” of a given city (or often its “sons”), united by devotion to its founding ancestors, its gods or heroes, its civic infrastructure and ritual calendar. In China’s Shandong Province, urban settlements were present over a thousand years before the earliest known royal dynasties, and similar findings have emerged from the Maya lowlands, where ceremonial centers of truly enormous size — so far, presenting no evidence of monarchy or stratification — can now be dated back as far as 1000 B.C., long before the rise of Classic Maya kings and dynasties.

What held these early experiments in urbanization together, if not kings, soldiers, and bureaucrats? For answers, we might turn to some other surprising discoveries on the interior grasslands of eastern Europe, north of the Black Sea, where archaeologists have found cities, just as large and ancient as those of Mesopotamia. The earliest date back to around 4100 B.C. While Mesopotamian cities, in what are now the lands of Syria and Iraq, took form initially around temples, and later also royal palaces, the prehistoric cities of Ukraine and Moldova were startling experiments in decentralized urbanization. These sites were planned on the image of a great circle — or series of circles — of houses, with nobody first, nobody last, divided into districts with assembly buildings for public meetings.

If it all sounds a little drab or “simple,” we should bear in mind the ecology of these early Ukrainian cities. Living at the frontier of forest and steppe, the residents were not just cereal farmers and livestock-keepers, but also hunted deer and wild boar, imported salt, flint and copper, and kept gardens within the bounds of the city, consuming apples, pears, cherries, acorns, hazelnuts and apricots — all served on painted ceramics, which are considered among the finest aesthetic creations of the prehistoric world.

Researchers are far from unanimous about what sort of social arrangements all this required, but most would agree the logistical challenges were daunting. Residents definitely produced a surplus, and with it came ample opportunity for some of them to seize control of the stocks and supplies, to lord it over the others or fight for the spoils, but over eight centuries we find little evidence of warfare or the rise of social elites. The true complexity of these early cities lay in the political strategies they adopted to prevent such things. Careful analysis by archaeologists shows how the social freedoms of the Ukrainian city dwellers were maintained through processes of local decision-making, in households and neighborhood assemblies, without any need for centralized control or top-down administration.

Yet, even now, these Ukrainian sites almost never come up in scholarship. When they do, academics tend to call them “mega-sites” rather than cities, a kind of euphemism that signals to a wider audience that they should not be thought of as proper cities but as villages that for some reason had expanded inordinately in size. Some even refer to them outright as “overgrown villages.” How do we account for this reluctance to welcome the Ukrainian mega-sites into the charmed circle of urban origins? Why has anyone with even a passing interest in the origin of cities heard of Uruk or Mohenjo-daro, but almost no one of Taljanky or Nebelivka?

It’s hard here not to recall Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” about an imaginary city that also made do without kings, wars, slaves or secret police. We have a tendency, Le Guin notes, to write off such a community as “simple,” but in fact these citizens of Omelas were “not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us.” The trouble is just that we have a bad habit of “considering happiness as something rather stupid.”

Le Guin had a point. Obviously, we have no idea how relatively happy the inhabitants of Ukrainian mega-sites like Maidanetske or Nebelivka were, compared with the steppe-lords who covered nearby landscapes with treasure-filled mounds, or even the servants ritually sacrificed at their funerals (though we can guess). And as anyone who has read the story knows, Omelas had some problems, too.

But the point remains: Why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications — that is, without overt displays of arrogance and cruelty — are somehow less complex than those who have not? Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of “city”? The mega-sites of Ukraine and adjoining regions were inhabited from roughly 4100 to 3300 B.C., which is a considerably longer period of time than most subsequent urban settlements. Eventually, they were abandoned. We still don’t know why. What they offer us, in the meantime, is significant: further proof that a highly egalitarian society has been possible on an urban scale.

W hy should these findings from the dim and distant past matter to us today? Since the Great Recession of 2008, the question of inequality — and with it, the long-term history of inequality — has become a major topic for debate. Something of a consensus has emerged among intellectuals and even, to some degree, the political classes, that levels of social inequality have gotten out of hand, and that most of the world’s problems result, in one way or another, from an ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. A very small percentage of the population controls the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. Cities have become emblematic of our predicament. Whether in Cape Town or San Francisco, we are no longer shocked or even that surprised by the sight of ever-expanding slums — sidewalks crammed with makeshift tents or shelters overflowing with the homeless and destitute.

To begin reversing this trajectory is an immense task. But there is historical precedent for that, too. Around the start of the common era, thousands of people came together in the Valley of Mexico to found a city we know today as Teotihuacan. Within a few centuries it became the largest settlement in Mesoamerica. In a colossal feat of civil engineering, its inhabitants diverted the San Juan River to flow through the heart of their new metropolis. Pyramids went up in the central district, associated with ritual killing. What we might expect to see next is the rise of luxurious palaces for warrior-rulers, but the citizens of Teotihuacan chose a different path. Around A.D. 300, the people of Teotihuacan changed course, redirecting their efforts away from the construction of grand monuments and devoting resources instead to the provision of high-quality housing for the majority of residents, who numbered around 100,000.

Of course, the past cannot provide instant solutions for the crises and challenges of the present. The obstacles are daunting, but what our research shows is that we can no longer count the forces of history and evolution among them. This has all sorts of important implications: For one thing, it suggests that we should be much less pessimistic about our future, since the mere fact that much of the world’s population now lives in cities may not determine how we live, to anything like the extent we might have assumed.

What we need today is another urban revolution to create more just and sustainable ways of living. The technology to support less centralized and greener urban environments — appropriate to modern demographic realities — already exists. Predecessors to our modern cities include not just the proto-megalopolis, but also the proto-garden-city, the proto-superblock, and a cornucopia of other urban forms, waiting for us to reclaim them. In the face of inequality and climate catastrophe, they offer the only viable future for the world’s cities, and so for our planet. All we are lacking now is the political imagination to make it happen. But as history teaches us, the brave new world we seek to create has existed before, and could exist again.

David Graeber was an anthropologist and activist. David Wengrow is a professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College London.

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Human History Gets a Rewrite

A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change.

A pyramid balances on its point, upside down, in the desert with blue sky and small figures including a caravan of camels

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M any years ago , when I was a junior professor at Yale, I cold-called a colleague in the anthropology department for assistance with a project I was working on. I didn’t know anything about the guy; I just selected him because he was young, and therefore, I figured, more likely to agree to talk.

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Five minutes into our lunch, I realized that I was in the presence of a genius. Not an extremely intelligent person—a genius. There’s a qualitative difference. The individual across the table seemed to belong to a different order of being from me, like a visitor from a higher dimension. I had never experienced anything like it before. I quickly went from trying to keep up with him, to hanging on for dear life, to simply sitting there in wonder.

That person was David Graeber . In the 20 years after our lunch, he published two books; was let go by Yale despite a stellar record (a move universally attributed to his radical politics); published two more books; got a job at Goldsmiths, University of London; published four more books, including Debt: The First 5,000 Years , a magisterial revisionary history of human society from Sumer to the present; got a job at the London School of Economics; published two more books and co-wrote a third; and established himself not only as among the foremost social thinkers of our time—blazingly original, stunningly wide-ranging, impossibly well read—but also as an organizer and intellectual leader of the activist left on both sides of the Atlantic, credited, among other things, with helping launch the Occupy movement and coin its slogan, “We are the 99 percent.”

On September 2, 2020, at the age of 59, David Graeber died of necrotizing pancreatitis while on vacation in Venice. The news hit me like a blow. How many books have we lost, I thought, that will never get written now? How many insights, how much wisdom, will remain forever unexpressed? The appearance of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is thus bittersweet, at once a final, unexpected gift and a reminder of what might have been. In his foreword, Graeber’s co-author, David Wengrow, an archaeologist at University College London, mentions that the two had planned no fewer than three sequels.

And what a gift it is, no less ambitious a project than its subtitle claims. The Dawn of Everything is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker; and accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men.

Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization—literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires. Flash forward a few thousand years, and with science, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, we witness the creation of the modern bureaucratic state. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice) , and teleological (the process culminates in us).

It is also, according to Graeber and Wengrow, completely wrong. Drawing on a wealth of recent archaeological discoveries that span the globe, as well as deep reading in often neglected historical sources (their bibliography runs to 63 pages), the two dismantle not only every element of the received account but also the assumptions that it rests on. Yes, we’ve had bands, tribes, cities, and states; agriculture, inequality, and bureaucracy, but what each of these were, how they developed, and how we got from one to the next—all this and more, the authors comprehensively rewrite. More important, they demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces , moving helplessly along a technological conveyor belt that takes us from the Serengeti to the DMV. We’ve had choices, they show, and we’ve made them. Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we’re used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring.

The bulk of the book (which weighs in at more than 500 pages) takes us from the Ice Age to the early states (Egypt, China, Mexico, Peru). In fact, it starts by glancing back before the Ice Age to the dawn of the species. Homo sapiens developed in Africa, but it did so across the continent, from Morocco to the Cape, not just in the eastern savannas, and in a great variety of regional forms that only later coalesced into modern humans. There was no anthropological Garden of Eden, in other words—no Tanzanian plain inhabited by “mitochondrial Eve” and her offspring. As for the apparent delay between our biological emergence, and therefore the emergence of our cognitive capacity for culture, and the actual development of culture—a gap of many tens of thousands of years—that, the authors tell us, is an illusion. The more we look, especially in Africa (rather than mainly in Europe, where humans showed up relatively late), the older the evidence we find of complex symbolic behavior.

That evidence and more—from the Ice Age, from later Eurasian and Native North American groups—demonstrate, according to Graeber and Wengrow, that hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined. The authors introduce us to sumptuous Ice Age burials (the beadwork at one site alone is thought to have required 10,000 hours of work), as well as to monumental architectural sites like Göbekli Tepe, in modern Turkey, which dates from about 9000 B.C. (at least 6,000 years before Stonehenge) and features intricate carvings of wild beasts. They tell us of Poverty Point, a set of massive, symmetrical earthworks erected in Louisiana around 1600 B.C., a “hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state.” They describe an indigenous Amazonian society that shifted seasonally between two entirely different forms of social organization (small, authoritarian nomadic bands during the dry months; large, consensual horticultural settlements during the rainy season). They speak of the kingdom of Calusa, a monarchy of hunter-gatherers the Spanish found when they arrived in Florida. All of these scenarios are unthinkable within the conventional narrative.

The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. Others looked at their neighbors and determined to live as differently as possible—a process that Graeber and Wengrow describe in detail with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Northern California, “puritans” who idealized thrift, simplicity, money, and work, in contrast to the ostentatious slaveholding chieftains of the Pacific Northwest. None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.

The authors carry this perspective forward to the ages that saw the emergence of farming, of cities, and of kings. In the locations where it first developed, about 10,000 years ago, agriculture did not take over all at once, uniformly and inexorably. (It also didn’t start in only a handful of centers—Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, Peru, the same places where empires would first appear—but more like 15 or 20.) Early farming was typically flood-retreat farming, conducted seasonally in river valleys and wetlands, a process that is much less labor-intensive than the more familiar kind and does not conduce to the development of private property. It was also what the authors call “play farming”: farming as merely one element within a mix of food-producing activities that might include hunting, herding, foraging, and horticulture.

Settlements, in other words, preceded agriculture—not, as we’ve thought, the reverse. What’s more, it took some 3,000 years for the Fertile Crescent to go from the first cultivation of wild grains to the completion of the domestication process—about 10 times as long as necessary, recent analyses have shown, had biological considerations been the only ones. Early farming embodied what Graeber and Wengrow call “the ecology of freedom”: the freedom to move in and out of farming, to avoid getting trapped by its demands or endangered by the ecological fragility that it entails.

From the December 2020 issue: The next decade could be even worse

The authors write their chapters on cities against the idea that large populations need layers of bureaucracy to govern them—that scale leads inevitably to political inequality. Many early cities, places with thousands of people, show no sign of centralized administration: no palaces, no communal storage facilities, no evident distinctions of rank or wealth. This is the case with what may be the earliest cities of all , Ukrainian sites like Taljanky, which were discovered only in the 1970s and which date from as early as roughly 4100 B.C., hundreds of years before Uruk, the oldest known city in Mesopotamia. Even in that “land of kings,” urbanism antedated monarchy by centuries. And even after kings arose, “popular councils and citizen assemblies,” Graeber and Wengrow write, “were stable features of government,” with real power and autonomy. Despite what we like to believe, democratic institutions did not begin just once, millennia later, in Athens.

If anything, aristocracy emerged in smaller settlements, the warrior societies that flourished in the highlands of the Levant and elsewhere, and that are known to us from epic poetry—a form of existence that remained in tension with agricultural states throughout the history of Eurasia, from Homer to the Mongols and beyond. But the authors’ most compelling instance of urban egalitarianism is undoubtedly Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that rivaled imperial Rome , its contemporary, for size and magnificence. After sliding toward authoritarianism, its people abruptly changed course, abandoning monument-building and human sacrifice for the construction of high-quality public housing. “Many citizens,” the authors write, “enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own.”

And so we arrive at the state, with its structures of central authority, exemplified variously by large-scale kingdoms, by empires, by modern republics—supposedly the climax form, to borrow a term from ecology, of human social organization. What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package that’s persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics). Some states have displayed just two, some only one—which means the union of all three, as in the modern state, is not inevitable (and may indeed, with the rise of planetary bureaucracies like the World Trade Organization, be already decomposing). More to the point, the state itself may not be inevitable. For most of the past 5,000 years, the authors write, kingdoms and empires were “exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants … systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority.”

Is “civilization” worth it, the authors want to know, if civilization—ancient Egypt, the Aztecs, imperial Rome, the modern regime of bureaucratic capitalism enforced by state violence—means the loss of what they see as our three basic freedoms: the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements? Or does civilization rather mean “mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality [and] simply caring for others”?

These are questions that Graeber, a committed anarchist—an exponent not of anarchy but of anarchism, the idea that people can get along perfectly well without governments—asked throughout his career. The Dawn of Everything is framed by an account of what the authors call the “indigenous critique.” In a remarkable chapter, they describe the encounter between early French arrivals in North America, primarily Jesuit missionaries, and a series of Native intellectuals—individuals who had inherited a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as “generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.”

The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom. The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition). They go further, making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We’re richer, went the logic, so we’re better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.

The Dawn of Everything is not a brief for anarchism, though anarchist values—antiauthoritarianism, participatory democracy, small- c communism—are everywhere implicit in it. Above all, it is a brief for possibility, which was, for Graeber, perhaps the highest value of all. The book is something of a glorious mess, full of fascinating digressions, open questions, and missing pieces. It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity.

“How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”? It’s a pretty good question. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” It isn’t clear to me how many possibilities are left us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.

This article appears in the November 2021 print edition with the headline “It Didn’t Have to Be This Way.”

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About the Author

Early Civilizations Had It All Figured Out

silhouettesof people with colorful rootlike shadows

Moments of sociopolitical tumult have a way of generating all-encompassing explanatory histories. These chronicles either indulge a sense of decline or applaud our advances. The appetite for such stories seems indiscriminate—tales of deterioration and tales of improvement are frequently consumed by the same people. Two of Bill Gates’s favorite soup-to-nuts books of the past decade, for example, are Steven Pinker’s “ The Better Angels of Our Nature ” and Yuval Noah Harari ’s “ Sapiens .” The first asserts that everything has been on the upswing since the Enlightenment, when we learned that rational argument was preferable to religious superstition and wanton cudgelling. The second concludes that everything was more or less O.K. until about twelve thousand years ago, when we first beat our swords into plowshares; this innocent decision, which must have seemed a good idea at the time, heralded an era of administrative hierarchy, state-sanctioned violence, and the unchecked proliferation of carbohydrates. Perhaps what readers like Gates find valuable in these books has less to do with the purported shape and direction of history than with the broad assurance that history has a shape and a direction.

Both stories, after all, adhere to a model of history that’s at once teleological (driven by specific forces to arrive at the foreordained present) and discontinuous (such magical things as farming and rationality emerged from the woodwork, unlocking successive stages of developmental maturity). They generally agree that the crucial rupture divided some original state of nature from the grand accession of civilization. Their arcs of irrevocable decline or compulsory progress are variations on themes that were given their most recognizable modern elaborations by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Pinker takes up the Hobbesian notion that early human existence was a brutish war of all against all. Harari takes rather literally Rousseau’s thought experiment that we were born free and rushed headlong into our chains. (“There is no way out of the imagined order,” Harari writes. “When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.”) In both accounts, guilelessness and egalitarianism are exchanged for knowledge and subordination; the only real difference lies in the cost-benefit assessments of that trade.

About a decade ago, the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, who died suddenly last year, at the age of fifty-nine, and the archeologist David Wengrow began to consider, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street , how they might contribute to the burgeoning literature on inequality. Not inequality of income or wealth but inequality of power: why so many people obey the orders of so few. The two scholars came to see, however, that to inquire after the “origins” of inequality was to defer to one of two myths—roughly, Hobbes’s or Rousseau’s—based on a deeply ingrained and deeply misleading fantasy of the human career. The product of their extended collaboration, “ The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity ” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is a profuse and antic account of how we came to take that old narrative for granted and why we might be better off if we let it go.

The consensus version of the story begins with the appearance of the first anatomically modern humans, about two hundred thousand years ago. For approximately a hundred and ninety thousand years, or about ninety-five per cent of our existence as a species, we lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers, following migratory herds and foraging for wild nuts and berries. These cohorts were small enough, and the demands of resource procurement and allocation were sufficiently minor, that decisions were face-to-face affairs among intimates. Despite the lurking menace of large cats, these early hunter-gatherers didn’t have to work particularly hard to fulfill their caloric needs, and they passed their ample leisure hours cavorting like primates. The order of the day was an easy egalitarianism, mostly for want of other options.

Twelve thousand years ago, give or take, the static pleasures of this long, undifferentiated epoch gave way to history proper. The hunter-gatherer bands lucky enough to find themselves on the flanks of the Zagros Mountains, or the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, began herding and farming. The rise of agriculture allowed for permanent settlements, which, growing dense, became cities. Urban commerce demanded division of labor, professional specialization, and bureaucratic oversight. Because wheat, unlike wild berries or the hindquarters of an aurochs, was a storable, countable good that appeared on a routine schedule, the selfish administrators of inchoate kingdoms could easily collect taxes, or tributes. Writing, which first emerged in the service of accounting, abetted the sort of control and surveillance upon which primitive racketeers came to depend. Where hunter-gatherers had hunted and gathered only enough to meet the demands of the day, agricultural communities created history’s first surpluses, and the extraction of tributes propped up rent-seeking élites and the managerial pyramids—not to mention standing armies—necessary to maintain their privilege. The rise of the arts, technology, and monumental architecture was the upside of the creation and immiseration of a peasant class.

From roughly the Enlightenment through the middle of the twentieth century, these developments—which came to be known as the Neolithic Revolution—were seen as generally good things. Societies were categorized by evolutionary stage on the basis of their mode of food production and economic organization, with full-fledged states taken to be the pinnacle of progress.

But it was also possible to think that the Neolithic Revolution was, all in all, a bad thing. In the late nineteen-sixties, ethnographers studying present-day hunter-gatherers in southern Africa argued that their “primitive” ways were not only freer and more egalitarian than the “later” stages of human development but also healthier and more fun. Agriculture required much longer and duller working hours; dense settlements and the proximity of livestock, as well as monotonous diets of cereal staples, encouraged malnutrition and disease. The poisoned fruit of grain cultivation had, in this telling, led to a cycle of population growth and more grain cultivation. Agriculture was a trap. Rousseau’s thought experiment, long written off by conservative critics as romantic nostalgia for the “noble savage,” was resuscitated, in modern, scientific form. It might have taken three or four decades for these insights to make their way to TED stages, but the paleo diet became a fundamental requirement of any self-respecting Silicon Valley founder.

For Graeber and Wengrow, this basic story, whether relayed in a triumphal or a defeatist register, is itself a trap. If we accept that the rise of agriculture meant the rise of the state—of political élites and intricate structures of power—then all we can do is tinker around the edges. Even if we regard the Paleolithic era as a garden paradise, we know that our reëntry is forever barred. For one thing, the requirements of hunting and gathering could support only some trivial fraction of the earth’s current population. A life under government control now seems inescapable.

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“The Dawn of Everything” is a lively, and often very funny, anarchist project that aspires to enlarge our political imagination by revitalizing the possibilities of the distant past. Superficially, it resembles other exhaustive, synoptic histories—it’s encyclopedic in scope, with sections introduced by comically baroque intertitles—but it disavows the intellectual trappings of a knowable arc, a linear structure, and internal necessity. As a stab at grandeur stripped of grandiosity, the book rejects the logic of technological or ecological determinism, structuring its narrative around our ancestors’ improvisatory responses to the challenges of happenstance. The result is an almost hallucinatory vision of the human epic as a series of idiosyncratic digressions. It is the story of how we made it up as we went along—of how things could have been different and, perhaps, still might be.

Drawing on new archeological findings, and revisiting old ones, Graeber and Wengrow argue that the granaries-to-overlords tale simply isn’t true. Rather, it’s a function of an extremely low-resolution approach to time. Viewed closely, the course of human history resists our favored schemata. Hunter-gatherer communities seem to have experimented with various forms of farming as side projects thousands of years before we have any evidence of cities. Even after urban centers developed, there was nothing like an ineluctable relationship between cities, technology, and domination.

The large town of Çatalhöyük, for example, on the Konya Plain in present-day Turkey, was settled around 7400 B.C. and seems to have been occupied for approximately fifteen hundred years—which, the authors note, is “roughly the same period of time that separates us from Amalafrida, Queen of the Vandals, who reached the height of her influence around AD 523.” The settlement was home to about five thousand people, but it had neither an obvious center nor any communal facilities. There weren’t even streets: households were densely packed together and accessed via roof ladders. The residents’ living areas were marked by a “distinctly macabre sense of interior design,” with narrow rooms outfitted with aurochs skulls and horns, along with raised platforms that encased the remains of up to sixty of the households’ dead ancestors. It was, as far as we know, one of the first large settlements to have practiced agriculture: the citizens derived most of their nutrition from cereals and beans they grew, as well as from domesticated sheep and goats. For a long time, all of this was taken together as a key example of the “agricultural revolution” in action, and the material remnants were interpreted to support the old story. Corpulent female figurines, assumed to be part of fertility rituals, were found in what were understood to be proto-religious shrines of some sort—the first indications of organized cultural systems.

In the past three decades, however, new archeological methods have disturbed many of these long-standing assumptions. The “shrines” were, Graeber and Wengrow tell us, just regular houses; the female figurines could be the discarded Barbie dolls of the Anatolian Neolithic, but they could also be a way of honoring female elders. The community seems to have supported itself for a thousand years with various forms of agriculture—floodplain farming and animal husbandry—without ever having committed itself to new forms of social or cultural organization. From what we can derive from wall murals and other expressive residues, Graeber and Wengrow say, “the cultural life of the community remained stubbornly oriented around the worlds of hunting and foraging.”

So what was actually going on in Çatalhöyük? Graeber and Wengrow interpret the evidence to propose that the town’s inhabitants managed their affairs perfectly well without the sort of administrative structures, royal or priestly, that were supposedly part of the agricultural package. “Despite the considerable size and density of the built-up area, there is no evidence for central authority,” the authors maintain. “Each household appears more or less a world unto itself—a discrete locus of storage, production and consumption. Each also seems to have held a significant degree of control over its own rituals.” Some houses appear to have been more lavishly furnished with aurochs horns or prized obsidian (which was brought in from Cappadocia, more than a hundred miles away), but there is no sign of élite neighborhoods or marks of caste consolidation. Different forms of social organization likely prevailed at different times of year, with greater division of labor necessary for cultivation and hunting in the summer and fall, followed by something more equitable—and, perhaps, matriarchal—during the winter.

Çatalhöyük isn’t the only site that calls into question the presumption that the Neolithic era was patterned on a single civilizational kit. Graeber and Wengrow report that some cities thrived long before they showed signs of hierarchical systems—such as temples and palaces—and some never developed them at all. “In others, centralized power seems to appear and then disappear,” they write. “It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any form of political organization.”

If cities didn’t lead to states, what did? Not any singular arrow of history, according to Graeber and Wengrow, but, rather, the gradual and dismal coalescence of otherwise unrelated, parallel processes. In particular, they think it involved the extension of patriarchal domination from the home to society at large. Their account of how household structures were transformed into despotic regimes requires some unconvincing hand-waving, but throughout they emphasize that any given process can be historically contingent without being simply inexplicable. The guiding principle of “The Dawn of Everything” is that our remote ancestors—not to mention certain present-day Indigenous groups long dismissed as living relics of superannuated barbarians—must be viewed as self-conscious political actors. Historical ruptures cannot be reduced to technological novelties or geographical constraints, even if those factors played crucial roles. They arose from our own choices and actions.

Graeber and Wengrow point to moments in the distant past in which they see instances of deliberate refusal: communities that weighed the advantages and disadvantages of one ostensibly evolutionary step or another (pastoralism, royal domination) and decided that they liked their current odds just fine. The communities that built Stonehenge had once adopted ways of cultivating cereal from Continental Europe, but recent research suggests that they returned to hazelnut collection around 3300 B.C. Various ecological theories have been floated to explain the sudden collapse, around 1350 A.D., of the brutal dynasty of Cahokia (in present-day Illinois), then the largest city in the Americas north of Mexico, but Graeber and Wengrow propose that the proto-empire’s subjects—who lived under constant surveillance and the threat of mass executions—simply defected en masse. Land wasn’t scarce, and they just walked away.

Where some groups adopted and abandoned different arrangements over time, others maintained a repertoire of assorted practices to suit fluctuating purposes. Modern ethnographic treatments of Indigenous communities describe an astonishing level of social plasticity (available to us, perhaps, in the highly etiolated form of Burning Man and other “temporary autonomous zones”). In a 1903 essay, the anthropologists Marcel Mauss and Henri Beuchat described the routine organizational reversals in Inuit communities. These groups spent their summers fishing and hunting in small cohorts under the possessive—and coercive—authority of a single male elder. Graeber and Wengrow describe how then, as the winter brought an influx of walruses and seals to the shore, “the Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone,” where “virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners.” It’s impossible to say whether such practices were designed or preserved to diminish the threat of permanent domination, but that was one of their effects.

Such groups weren’t ignorant of whatever else was on offer; they were frequently in contact with other societies, took stock of their habits, and sought to define themselves in contrarian ways, in a rather underexplored process that, following the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, Graeber and Wengrow call “schismogenesis.” In the Pacific Northwest, men of rank among the Kwakiutl held lavish, greasy potlatches and took war captives as slaves; their neighbors to the south of the Klamath River, the Yurok, prized restraint and self-denial, and committed themselves to modes of subsistence that rendered slavery, which they found morally repugnant, unnecessary.

When divergences in cultural values occurred within societies rather than between them, the result could take the form of revolutionary sentiment. Consider the city of Teotihuacan, which was founded around 100 B.C.—more than a thousand years before the rise of the Aztecs—and was almost certainly the largest city in the pre-colonial Americas. The metropolis was first constructed on a monumental scale, with the kind of pyramids and palaces that indicate social hierarchy. At a certain point, however, the people of Teotihuacan decided against investing in more fancy villas. Instead, Graeber and Wengrow write, “the citizens embarked on a remarkable project of urban renewal, supplying high-quality apartments for nearly all the city’s population, regardless of wealth or status.” They accomplished all of this without wheeled vehicles, sailing ships, animal-powered traction, or advanced metallurgy. Perhaps most important was that, although they were in contact with the monarchical Mayan societies nearby, the people of Teotihuacan flourished for some three centuries without submitting to the rule of anything like a king.

Except, we learn in passing, some archeologists believe that they did. (The scholarly debate on the matter turns in part on the interpretation of a few inscriptions in the Mayan city of Tikal.) Though Graeber and Wengrow have marshalled a vast amount of archeological evidence, they acknowledge that much of what anyone has to say about ancient societies is speculative. Their hope is that, even if some of their examples remain dubious, the accumulated weight of recent findings—and the more inventive assortment of political organization they imply—establishes the glib tendentiousness of Big History. As they put it, “We are at least trying to see what happens when we drop the teleological habit of thought.”

Big History, to be sure, has long been out of favor in academic circles. Although Graeber and Wengrow can be a little self-congratulatory, they do point out that one of the first things you learn in an introductory course in anthropology or archeology is that pat appeals to cultural evolution are retrograde and silly. Critiques of grand narratives have been important to the modern self-image of these fields—in part as penance for having once been happy to serve the priorities of empire, peddling “civilization” as a gift to the “primitives.” One consequence, however, is that wholesale synthetic accounts of human history tend to be written in the extravagantly roughshod mode of Harari’s “Sapiens” or Jared Diamond’s “ Guns, Germs, and Steel .” (Graeber and Wengrow neglect to mention their strongest rivals: the science fictions of writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson.)

At the same time, Graeber and Wengrow know better than to limit “The Dawn of Everything” to a litany of counterexamples. In the late nineteen-sixties, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz worried that his discipline had gained a reputation for simple negation—a message encapsulated in the phrase “Not on Easter Island.” In other words, there were holes in every story: you could always puncture some “high-wrought” theory with a shard of anomalous data from the remote place where you did your fieldwork. Yet when anthropology was reduced to “spiteful ethnography,” Geertz argued, it put itself in the business of “disapproving of intellectual constructions but not of creating, or perhaps even of understanding, any.” Graeber and Wengrow seem to agree. It’s all well and good, they might think, to murmur “Not on Easter Island” when a popularizer gets too expansive or confident, but they worry that if people aren’t offered an alternative framework they will still default to some version of the pernicious cultural-evolution myth—and accept that the familiar hierarchies of governance are simply the price of sophistication.

Teacher wrangles children in museum with a rope and stanchions.

Consider the widespread assumption, which Graeber long contested, that larger human societies can’t resolve collective-action problems without top-down authority. In 2014, he and the tech investor Peter Thiel debated the issue onstage. Thiel argued that modern life is much too convoluted for truly democratic participation, which is why his model for innovation was the miniature suzerainty of the startup. As a quasi-libertarian, he admitted some sympathy for Graeber’s political anarchism, but he didn’t see how it could ever work: “Could you build the Manhattan Project, could you build Apollo, could you get someone to the moon in a radically decentralized chaotic system? Or do you need coördination and planning?”

Curiously, there are moments in “The Dawn of Everything” in which Graeber and Wengrow seem to yield to this way of thinking; they suggest, at one point, that we pay less attention to Egypt’s heroic pyramid-building Old and Middle Kingdoms and more to its apparently helter-skelter “intermediate” periods, during which masterpieces might have gone unbuilt but people did not have to fear being summarily enslaved or buried alive as part of a funeral entourage. Still, it’s by contending at length with the prejudices of scale—the expectation that there is some natural upper bound on the number of people who can live and work together without significant coördination from above—that the book signals its broader ambitions. “In the standard, textbook version of human history, scale is crucial,” the authors write. “The tiny bands of foragers in which humans were thought to have spent most of their evolutionary history could be relatively democratic and egalitarian precisely because they were small.” We therefore persuade ourselves that, given the problem of strangers, we need “such things as urban planners, social workers, tax auditors and police.”

Yet pre-agricultural people erected great testaments to their ways of life in the absence of those structural supports—at Göbekli Tepe, also in Turkey, as well as on the Ukrainian steppe and in the Mississippi Delta. And post-agricultural societies could maintain systematic achievements without administrators to run them. “It turns out that farmers are perfectly capable of co-ordinating very complicated irrigation systems all by themselves,” Graeber and Wengrow say. “Urban populations seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-governance in ways which, while usually not quite ‘egalitarian,’ were likely a good deal more participatory than almost any urban government today.” Ancient emperors mostly “saw little reason to interfere, as they simply didn’t care very much about how their subjects cleaned the streets or maintained their drainage ditches.” About eight thousand years ago, the villagers of Tell Sabi Abyad, in present-day Syria, saw to a variety of complex tasks—pasturing the flocks; sowing, harvesting, and threshing grain; weaving flax; making beads; and carving stones—that presumably required extensive inter-household coöperation, yet everyone lived in uniform dwellings. Though writing wasn’t invented for another three thousand years, a scheme of geometric tokens, stored and archived in a central if nondescript depot, had been put in place to monitor resource administration. The archeological remains of the village, remarkably preserved by a catastrophic fire that baked its structures of mud and clay, show no signs of caste division or a presiding authority.

Graeber and Wengrow hope that, once we grasp how ancient mega-sites (in Ukraine or in Jomon-era Japan) could grow large and manifold without a literate bureaucracy, or the way early literate societies (Uruk, in Mesopotamia) might have managed the trick of participatory self-governance, we might renew and expand our own cramped notions of what’s politically tenable. We could come to detach progress from obedience. As they put it, “Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do. If this is so, we can at least refine our initial question: the real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible to simply laugh them out of court.”

Graeber and Wengrow’s dearest aspiration is to quicken that laughter once again. “Nowadays, most of us find it increasingly difficult even to picture what an alternative economic or social order would be like,” they write. “Our distant ancestors seem, by contrast, to have moved regularly back and forth between them. If something did go terribly wrong in human history—and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did—then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.”

This wasn’t a matter of sheer forgetfulness, they say. It was by design. At least some of the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, they tell us, were bewildered and appalled by the strange European custom of giving and taking orders. Their judgments were widely circulated in the Europe of the early Enlightenment, where Indigenous people were often featured in dialogues meant to criticize the status quo. At the time, they were typically dismissed as the rhetorical sock-puppetry of canny European heretics. For how could “Natives” credibly engage with political constitutions or deliberate over consequential decisions?

“The Dawn of Everything” makes a persuasive case that what was passed off as Indigenous criticism of European political thinking was, in fact, Indigenous criticism of European political thinking. These Indigenous objections could be safely deflected only if they were seen as European ventriloquism, not ideas from another adult community with alternative values. “Portraying history as a story of material progress, that framework recast indigenous critics as innocent children of nature, whose views on freedom were a mere side effect of their uncultivated way of life and could not possibly offer a serious challenge to contemporary social thought,” Graeber and Wengrow write.

The whole symbolic apparatus of cultural evolution aimed to make freedom—which they define as the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey orders, and the freedom to imagine less hierarchical ways of organizing ourselves—seem archaic and perilous. When we speak of the onset of social inequality, we’re accepting the idea that real freedom is the plaything of children. The species grew up, and grew out of it. Peter Thiel wonders why we don’t yet live in the future of our dreams. Graeber and Wengrow think the first step forward is a reminder of the past we deserve. ♦

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2021

New York Times Bestseller

THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING

A new history of humanity.

by David Graeber & David Wengrow ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 9, 2021

A fascinating, intellectually challenging big book about big ideas.

An ingenious new look at “the broad sweep of human history” and many of its “foundational” stories.

Graeber, a former professor of anthropology at London School of Economics who died in 2020, and Wengrow, professor of comparative archaeology at University College London, take a dim view of conventional accounts of the rise of civilizations, emphasize contributions from Indigenous cultures and the missteps of the great Enlightenment thinkers, and draw countless thought-provoking conclusions. In 1651, British philosopher Thomas Hobbes proclaimed that humans require laws and government authority because life in primitive cultures was “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” A few decades later, French thinker Rousseau wrote that humans in a state of nature were free until they acquired property that required legal protection. Graeber and Wengrow point out that these conceptions of historical progression dominate the opinions of many experts, who assume that society passed through stages of development: hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on. Graeber and Wengrow maintain that no scientific evidence supports this view, adding that traditional scholarship says little about “prehistory,” during which supposedly egalitarian hunter-gatherers roamed and foraged until about 10,000 years ago, when they purportedly took up agriculture and things became interesting. This orthodox view dismisses countless peoples who had royal courts and standing armies, built palaces, and accumulated wealth. As the authors write, “there is simply no reason to assume that the adoption of agriculture in more remote periods also meant the inception of private land ownership, territoriality, or an irreversible departure from forager egalitarianism.” Many early cities thrived for centuries with no sign of hierarchy, contradicting scholars who assume that authoritarian rule appears naturally whenever large populations gather. The quest for the “origin of the state,” given scattered and contradictory evidence, may be a fool’s errand. Graeber and Wengrow, while providing no definitive answers, cast grave doubts on those theories that have been advanced to date.

Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-374-15735-7

Page Count: 608

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY

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PIRATE ENLIGHTENMENT, OR THE REAL LIBERTALIA

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BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the pocket change collective series.

by Alok Vaid-Menon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.

The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

Notes on the first 150 years in america.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates ( The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood , 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE

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clock This article was published more than 2 years ago

After 200,000 years, we’re still trying to figure out what humanity is all about

Anthropologist David Graeber, famous for summing up several millennia of economic history in his best-selling “Debt: The First 5,000 Years , ” spent the past decade collaborating with the archaeologist David Wengrow on another ambitious project. The two scholars sifted through evidence from 200,000 years of human history in an effort to understand how inequality began. Their exhaustive research has come to fruition in “The Dawn of Everything,” a fascinating argument about why humans today are “stuck” in rigid, hierarchical states that would have appalled our ancestors. “Something has gone terribly wrong with the world,” they write. “A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion.”

Sadly, this book is also Graeber’s last work. The famed anarchist philosopher, a major figure in the Occupy movement as well as an influential scholar, died in late 2020. This final work is a fitting capstone to his career, a tome that rivals fantasy epics in heft and imaginative scope. Indeed, Graeber and Wengrow seem aware of this comparison, noting with a wink at one point that early human history, with its Neanderthals and Homo sapiens , was like a world full of “hobbits, giants and elves.” And though the book is packed with explanatory material from early civilizations — Wengrow is an expert in ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern archaeology — it’s also a self-conscious exercise in mythmaking. “Social theory is largely a game of make-believe,” the authors write. “Essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible.” Put another way, this isn’t a book that attempts to be scientifically accurate, whatever that might mean. It’s a polemic.

The book begins by turning the history of the Enlightenment on its head, contending that the 18th century European quest for rational thought actually begins in the Americas with a Wendat intellectual named Kandiaronk. Back in 1703, their story goes, a French colonial explorer named Lahontan published a book of dialogues with a thinly disguised version of Kandiaronk, in which the two debated the nature of freedom and civil society. (Lahontan spoke Wendat and Algonquin languages, so it’s plausible that these dialogues were basically edited versions of actual conversations.) Lahontan argues that European society was wealthy, liberated and spiritually superior. Kandiaronk counters that the French were enslaved to their king, brutally ruled by money and morally impoverished because they allowed some people to go hungry while others wasted food.

Kandiaronk and other Indigenous thinkers were the true architects of Enlightenment, Graeber and Wengrow argue, because they called into question everything that Europeans had taken for granted about their lives. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other French philosophers would eagerly read Lahontan’s book, as well as other popular dialogues with Indigenous people published at the time, influencing their own thinking about inequality. What Europeans called wealth was in fact spiritual poverty; and their precious freedom was reserved only for aristocrats. Inspired by Kandiaronk’s critique, “The Dawn of Everything” invites readers to look at our received wisdom about civilization from diverse perspectives and not assume that the Western state is the only rational political system.

Many of us were taught in school that civilization evolves in revolutionary jumps that are roughly the same no matter where you are. These “revolutions” take us from simple to complex cultures: Hunter-gatherers become farmers; farmers make the leap to industrialized nation states. In “The Dawn of Everything,” we learn that this might have been true in some European regions, but it’s not how most civilizations emerge. In the near east, for example, there were hunter-gatherers who developed urbanized states without ever moving through an agricultural phase. Meanwhile, in the Americas, some Indigenous groups were agriculturalists for half the year and nomads for the other half. Though some civilizations developed bureaucracies, militaries and property regimes, others held property communally and established temporary police forces that were dissolved every few months.

Slowly a new picture of human civilization emerges, one that does not conform to tidy Western myths of development. And that’s when Graeber and Wengrow pull the rug out from under us, revealing that the search for the origin of inequality — ostensibly their project — isn’t a useful way to cure what ails us. It’s impossible for everyone to be “equal,” they write, and indeed a focus on equality leads to one-size-fits-all accounts of history. Instead, we can only get unstuck from our present crisis of disaster capitalism by exploring the origins of “freedom,” especially the freedom to move anywhere, disobey authority and redefine the mythologies that help us make sense of our lives.

Graeber and Wengrow tell a dazzling array of stories about civilizations across many continents and thousands of years, all of which are grappling with what it means to be free. We’re immersed in tales of the 9,000-year-old Turkish city of Catalhoyuk, where there was no great “agricultural revolution,” but instead thousands of years of gradual transformation from hunting and gathering to planting a yearly harvest; the 19th century Yurok civilization on the California coast, where people tried and rejected agriculture; and the Minoan urbanites of Bronze Age Crete, ruled by female politicians who shared power with male traders.

One of this book’s most intriguing assertions is that humans have been engaging in social experiments and political debate throughout our entire 200,000 year history, trying every sort of political structure along the way. The problem is that we tend to remember the civilizations founded on war and hierarchy, often because those societies are generally obsessed with recording their every (exaggerated) deed in writing. Modern thinkers often marginalize societies built on oral traditions and ever-changing political structures, relegating them to “prehistory” or “the dark ages.”

Exploring these supposedly inferior eras, we find models for civilizations based on vast networks of hospitality and trade, rather than conquest. Graeber and Wengrow speculate that the Hopewell peoples of North America, whose incredible earthworks have stood for millennia, did not define their civilization as a social ladder with some overlord at its top. Instead, their many cities and villages were in a loose confederation, where any individual had the freedom to disobey her chief, leave her band and visit other groups where she might be welcomed. Though the Hopewell were part of a mass society of great complexity, they managed to retain key freedoms for individuals — freedoms that everyone in the world has lost.

Occasionally, Graeber and Wengrow fall into the same kind of biased thinking as the Enlightenment-obsessed men they criticize. Looking back into history, they find examples of anarchism everywhere, offering suspiciously utopian accounts of cultures to whom they ascribe values of feminism and anarchy. Still, the authors admit openly that their examples are cherry-picked, and in some cases interpreted extremely speculatively, because they aren’t writing a science textbook. They’re writing a manifesto, suggesting another way for humanity to live, inspired by ideas our ancestors left to us.

The more we learn about the many paths our ancestors have taken, the more possible futures open up. “The Dawn of Everything” begins as a sharp rejoinder to sloppy cultural analysis and ends as a paean to freedoms that most of us never realized were available. Knowing that there were other ways to live, Graeber and Wengrow conclude, allows us to rethink what we might yet become.

The Dawn of Everything

A New History of Humanity

David Graeber and David Wengrow Macmillan.

704 pp. $35

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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Summary and analysis of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber by
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Book Review: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

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COMMENTS

'The Dawn of Everything' Aims to Rewrite ... - The New York Times
“The Dawn of Everything” sees pervasive evidence for large complex societies that thrived without the existence of the state, and defines freedom chiefly as “freedom to disobey.”
Digging for Utopia - The New York Review of Books
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow, assails the proposition that there’s some cereals-to-states arrow of history. A mode of production, they insist, doesn’t come with a predetermined politics.
What David Graeber, ‘Dawn of Everything’ Author, Left Behind
“The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,” by David Graeber and David Wengrow is out now. Graeber died unexpectedly in 2020.
Opinion | What Jared Diamond and Yuval ... - The New York Times
Ancient History Shows How We Can Create a More Equal World. Mr. Graeber and Mr. Wengrow are the authors of the forthcoming book, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,” from...
Review: ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity ...
The Dawn of Everything is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized...
Early Civilizations Had It All Figured Out | The New Yorker
Early Civilizations Had It All Figured Out. A contrarian account of our prehistory argues that cities once flourished without rulers and rules—and still could. By Gideon Lewis-Kraus. November 1,...
The Dawn of Everything - Wikipedia
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a 2021 book by anthropologist and activist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. It was first published in the United Kingdom on 19 October 2021 by Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin Books ).
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity - Goodreads
A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING - Kirkus Reviews
New York Times Bestseller. An ingenious new look at “the broad sweep of human history” and many of its “foundational” stories. Graeber, a former professor of anthropology at London School of Economics who died in 2020, and Wengrow, professor of comparative archaeology at University College London, take a dim view of conventional ...
Book review of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of ...
Inspired by Kandiaronk’s critique, “The Dawn of Everything” invites readers to look at our received wisdom about civilization from diverse perspectives and not assume that the Western state...