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Cover of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

David Graeber and David Wengrow

HistoryPolitics & Society
Publish date
2021
Publisher
Penguin Books, Limited
Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 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. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.
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Books cited in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

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  1. Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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    Critiqued as the foundational narrative establishing modern misconceptions about the origins of social inequality.

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  2. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

    Yuval Noah Harari

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    Challenged for its portrayal of the agricultural revolution as a trap that doomed egalitarian foragers.

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  3. Society Against the State

    Pierre Clastres

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    Draws on Clastres's thesis that indigenous societies actively organize institutions to prevent authoritarian power.

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  4. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

    Steven Pinker

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    Critiqued for propagating a Hobbesian myth that pre-agricultural human existence was nasty, brutish, and short.

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  5. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

    Jared Diamond

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    Argued against for promoting environmental determinism and rigid, teleological stages of societal evolution.

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  6. Stone Age Economics

    Marshall Sahlins

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    Cited for redefining hunter-gatherer abundance and dismantling economic assumptions about prehistoric scarcity.

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  7. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

    James C. Scott

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    Shares the core thesis that early agriculture did not inevitably mandate state formation and bondage.

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  8. Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology

    Marcel Mauss

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    Cited to show how societies historically shifted between egalitarian and authoritarian social orders by season.

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  9. The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire

    Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus

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    Engaged with critically regarding archaeological evidence for the emergence of prehistoric hierarchy and inequality.

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Recommendations

  • Debt: The First 5,000 Years

    David Graeber

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    Graeber's earlier foundational work examining the non-linear history of human economic arrangements and state power.

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