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Thoughts: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
I loved this book. I really loved it. It's got its flaws. It's repetitive and intimidatingly long (almost 700 pages if you count the bibliography). So many people will be put off by the length, which is a real shame, because the book is incredibly readable. It's smart without using academic jargon--I think any thoughtful adult could read and appreciate it. But it really should have had a stronger-handed editor. I know some of you will be like, "I do not have time for that book!" and I understand, but I really do recommend it. I think it's worth the investment of time, and I would really, really love to hear y'all's thoughts on it!
I'm writing this post less as a review than as an attempt to synthesize for myself all of the interlocking ideas this book had going on, because it had a lot! Which I love! Because I love ideas! Especially ideas about how people interact and make choices! This book is very much Team Free Will, too, which speaks to me deeply.
Graeber, an anthropologist (he died in 2021, which is heartbreaking to me--I love the way his mind worked), and Wengrow, an archaeologist, decided that they wanted to write a sweeping history of the emergence of human societies. They started by asking, "What are the origins of inequality?" before realizing that was completely, completely the wrong question. Instead, the question is: how many ways can people arrange themselves and how much choice do they have in the matter?
They draw on a wide, wide array of example societies, mostly in prehistoric Eurasia and in pre-contact (and post-contact, but pre-founding of the US) North America and Mesoamerica. They make some side trips to visit South America, Africa, and Oceania as well.
One thing I really appreciate about the book is how constantly the authors say, "Based on what we know now..." and "This is a theory, and it may be proved wrong..." and basically just repeatedly remind us that, hey! There's still so much to learn! There's so much we don't know! We'll learn more and we'll change our minds! There are some things we'll never be able to learn because they are completely lost to the mists of time! There's a humility to the way they write, even though there's also an audacity to write a book subtitled "a new history of humanity."
Some of the ideas they champion are widely accepted in the archaeological/anthropological fields but haven't really filtered out to popular history yet. Others are, according to the authors, really heresy within the academic world. As I mentioned--there are a lot of ideas. But there are a few Big Ones that are repeated time and again and which consistently interact with each other throughout the book. So those are the ones I'm going to focus on.
Idea 1: There is no one way that human communities develop. Human communities arrange themselves not on the basis of some natural "laws" but by human choices. People have always had far, far more say in how their communities will be arranged than we like to think--people have always been political actors with political agency.
Stated outright, this idea should be pretty common sensical, but most people don't actually believe this. There are all these ideas floating around about how agriculture naturally leads to hierarchies, about how societies of a certain size can only operate if they have a hierarchical leadership, etc. The authors argue that, actually, there is an endless array of ways in which humans can set up their societies, including ways that are built around the conscious effort to remain egalitarian.
Graeber and Wengrow believe that both the Rousseauean (humans were so innocent and free until civilization trapped them) and Hobbesian (life in the past was nasty, brutish, and short, and we are all on an upward, progressive trajectory) theories are both bullshit. They also believe that those two schools of thought still dominate our cultural ideas of the past. Nope, Graeber and Wengrow say. Humans are constantly negotiating how we will interact with each other--we've been doing it as long as we've been humans and we've done it everywhere we've lived (which is almost everywhere on earth).
They are adamant in their rejection of the idea that small human populations are inherently egalitarian and populations which reach a certain size will automatically become hierarchical. They hate this popular idea so much that I really think it's the driving passion behind the book. No!!! People have set up their societies in various ways throughout time and space, and size has an effect, but size is not destiny.
Some of the earliest cities--sizable ones!--had governments we can only describe as democratic, even if they aren't democratic in the way contemporary nation-states are (I get the feeling that both Graeber and Wengrow really dislike States, which is not surprising from Graeber since he was a notable anarchist). Apparently there are all kinds of cities throughout human history that did not have hierarchies, were not ruled by monarchies or aristocracies or even religious bureaucracies, but set themselves up intentionally so that no one could accumulate power. Usually in the long term something happened to upset that careful balance and some person or group did accumulate power, but sometimes the egalitarian arrangements lasted for centuries, and even if the power-grab happened, a community could decide to reject it and set up another democratic structure again.
Hand-in-hand with all that is this assertion: there was no Agricultural Revolution, and agriculture does not lead directly to the kind of hierarchical societies that we think of (ancient Egypt, etc.) as the natural outgrowth of a reliance on agriculture. Between the time that human beings (women, the authors argue) discovered how to use agriculture to their benefit and the time when societies became dependent on agriculture, there was five thousand years when people had blended diets of both cultivated (but not yet domesticated) crops and foraged/hunted foods. This time lasted even longer in many other places in the world outside the Ancient Near East, and longest of all in the Americas (and probably Oceania, but that isn't deeply explored). Even in cities, people still depended on foraging and hunting just as much as crops.
Idea 2: There are three kinds of human freedom: a) the freedom to move (to pack up and go to a different place if you don't like what's going on where you are--the freedom to leave a community behind and join or start another one), b) the freedom to disobey (to listen to what a leader says and then decide not to do that thing without fear of coercive violence), and c) the freedom to re-organize social relations, including in a community that already exists. In the past few centuries, with the rise of States, we have somehow lost all of these freedoms. The writers rely heavily on indigenous (especially North American Indian) critiques of what we think of a modern Western culture. Many indigenous communities had held onto one or more of these freedoms and were absolutely horrified by European societies when they encountered them because they could see that all those freedoms were gone.
[As an aside: they note that this helps explain why when Europeans were captured by indigenous groups, they overwhelmingly chose to stay with those groups, even if they had the choice to go back to European society. Not to mention many people ran off and "went native" of their own free will. I'm really glad they addressed this because this has been a thing I've spent a lot of time over the years thinking about.]
While some of these indigenous societies were interacting with European societies for the first time and criticizing them, the Enlightenment began, and Europeans started talking about freedom and equality. The authors argue that the indigenous perspective had a profound influence on Enlightenment thinking. But they also kind of say (without outright saying it), that the Enlightenment thinkers didn't really understand the kinds of freedom that indigenous people were so protective of (and that Western ideas of freedom and of property are based around Roman Law, wherein the paterfamilias has total control over the lives of his family and slaves).
Idea 3: The State has no origin. Or...not one origin. "[T]hree principles--call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma--are also the three possible bases of social power. The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral. Usually, all three coexist to some degree. Even in societies where interpersonal violence is rare, one may well find hierarchies based on knowledge."
If you want to understand how hierarchies develop, it helps to consider the three kinds of power that may accumulate in a society, based on the three principles above: a) bureaucratic or administrative power, that runs the day-to-day complicated logistics of a society (control of information), b) sovereignty, the "monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within [a given] territory" (control of violence) and c) political jockeying (individual charisma). They look at a bunch of different societies from the Incas and Mayas to the ancient Egyptians and Minoans and Romans and many other less famous communities, and they examine how some of them develop one or two of the three powers but not the others.
Basically: It is "possible to have monarchs, aristocracies, slavery and extreme forms of patriarchal domination, even without a state," but also: large communities of people do not inevitably lead to those things.
[There's also another theory they float about the interaction of care and power that defines slavery that I think is super interesting, but frankly that should be a whole other book.]
The question they come to at the end is: how did we get "stuck"? How did we come to live in a world in which almost no one has any of the three freedoms, in which we believe that we really don't have much political agency and things are just the way they are, in which we find the idea of equality (a problematic term, they acknowledge) a fantasy? Why did that happen? It wasn't inevitable, that's for sure.
They don't know the answer--or at least they don't provide it here. I know they were set to write further books together, and I'm hopeful that Wengrow will use their unbelievably large amount of notes and finish at least one or two of them, possibly with another writer. I'll really, really miss Graeber's perspective--what a loss!
But anyway, that's why the book feels more like the opening question of a conversation than it does a book that provides answers. I really, really hope that lots of people will engage with this (outside the realm of academia, which most of us have no access to) and explore more of these ideas!
I came away with two main reactions.
Reaction 1: hope that humanity can figure out other ways to live together that don't depend on the subjugation of some and the immense wealth and power of others. Obviously, utopias will never happen, and it's dangerous to think that they will. But things can be so much better--we can regain those three freedoms.
I know this will be a herculean undertaking. Even if we can convince a sizable minority of people that other social arrangements are possible, the actual changing of our societies would take generations and would probably be pretty painful because of the centuries of sediment that have built up around our current State-dominated global society. Inertia is the enemy here. But it is possible. And with climate change, I think it's going to end up happening. I just hope it happens in a less horrific way than I think it could happen.
And of course this isn't a once-and-done kind of thing. As soon as you set up a societal arrangement, you have to start tweaking it. Human communities require constant re-calibration, so the work is never, ever done. But that calibration can happen. And that is so hopeful to me.
Reaction 2: I really need to read up on feminist anthropologists' thoughts on how the patriarchy developed. The reality of patriarchy is a subtle thread throughout the book--it's never the focus, but the authors acknowledge its power. They also address enough societies where women had real freedom (and a few where women were the main decision-makers for their communities) that it's clear that patriarchy and the subjugation of women are absolutely not inevitable. But at the same time, they are so ubiquitous that there's certainly something going on there. I really have no idea where to even begin to find the answer to the question of why men subjugate women. But I need to explore some possible answers. Now that this question is uppermost in my mind, I just cannot continue to live in a world that limits women's power without knowing why that keeps happening over and over throughout human history!
Again, I really recommend this book. If you're intrigued by any of the things you've read here, I think you'll really enjoy reading the way that Graeber and Wengrow support their arguments and why they developed those arguments in the first place. And in the process, you get to learn about just tons of different human cultures and their quirks, including many that you can't find in most popular histories. That's my idea of a good time.
[eta] Wow, that got long. Kudos to anyone who actually reads it all!
I'm writing this post less as a review than as an attempt to synthesize for myself all of the interlocking ideas this book had going on, because it had a lot! Which I love! Because I love ideas! Especially ideas about how people interact and make choices! This book is very much Team Free Will, too, which speaks to me deeply.
Graeber, an anthropologist (he died in 2021, which is heartbreaking to me--I love the way his mind worked), and Wengrow, an archaeologist, decided that they wanted to write a sweeping history of the emergence of human societies. They started by asking, "What are the origins of inequality?" before realizing that was completely, completely the wrong question. Instead, the question is: how many ways can people arrange themselves and how much choice do they have in the matter?
They draw on a wide, wide array of example societies, mostly in prehistoric Eurasia and in pre-contact (and post-contact, but pre-founding of the US) North America and Mesoamerica. They make some side trips to visit South America, Africa, and Oceania as well.
One thing I really appreciate about the book is how constantly the authors say, "Based on what we know now..." and "This is a theory, and it may be proved wrong..." and basically just repeatedly remind us that, hey! There's still so much to learn! There's so much we don't know! We'll learn more and we'll change our minds! There are some things we'll never be able to learn because they are completely lost to the mists of time! There's a humility to the way they write, even though there's also an audacity to write a book subtitled "a new history of humanity."
Some of the ideas they champion are widely accepted in the archaeological/anthropological fields but haven't really filtered out to popular history yet. Others are, according to the authors, really heresy within the academic world. As I mentioned--there are a lot of ideas. But there are a few Big Ones that are repeated time and again and which consistently interact with each other throughout the book. So those are the ones I'm going to focus on.
Idea 1: There is no one way that human communities develop. Human communities arrange themselves not on the basis of some natural "laws" but by human choices. People have always had far, far more say in how their communities will be arranged than we like to think--people have always been political actors with political agency.
Stated outright, this idea should be pretty common sensical, but most people don't actually believe this. There are all these ideas floating around about how agriculture naturally leads to hierarchies, about how societies of a certain size can only operate if they have a hierarchical leadership, etc. The authors argue that, actually, there is an endless array of ways in which humans can set up their societies, including ways that are built around the conscious effort to remain egalitarian.
Graeber and Wengrow believe that both the Rousseauean (humans were so innocent and free until civilization trapped them) and Hobbesian (life in the past was nasty, brutish, and short, and we are all on an upward, progressive trajectory) theories are both bullshit. They also believe that those two schools of thought still dominate our cultural ideas of the past. Nope, Graeber and Wengrow say. Humans are constantly negotiating how we will interact with each other--we've been doing it as long as we've been humans and we've done it everywhere we've lived (which is almost everywhere on earth).
They are adamant in their rejection of the idea that small human populations are inherently egalitarian and populations which reach a certain size will automatically become hierarchical. They hate this popular idea so much that I really think it's the driving passion behind the book. No!!! People have set up their societies in various ways throughout time and space, and size has an effect, but size is not destiny.
Some of the earliest cities--sizable ones!--had governments we can only describe as democratic, even if they aren't democratic in the way contemporary nation-states are (I get the feeling that both Graeber and Wengrow really dislike States, which is not surprising from Graeber since he was a notable anarchist). Apparently there are all kinds of cities throughout human history that did not have hierarchies, were not ruled by monarchies or aristocracies or even religious bureaucracies, but set themselves up intentionally so that no one could accumulate power. Usually in the long term something happened to upset that careful balance and some person or group did accumulate power, but sometimes the egalitarian arrangements lasted for centuries, and even if the power-grab happened, a community could decide to reject it and set up another democratic structure again.
Hand-in-hand with all that is this assertion: there was no Agricultural Revolution, and agriculture does not lead directly to the kind of hierarchical societies that we think of (ancient Egypt, etc.) as the natural outgrowth of a reliance on agriculture. Between the time that human beings (women, the authors argue) discovered how to use agriculture to their benefit and the time when societies became dependent on agriculture, there was five thousand years when people had blended diets of both cultivated (but not yet domesticated) crops and foraged/hunted foods. This time lasted even longer in many other places in the world outside the Ancient Near East, and longest of all in the Americas (and probably Oceania, but that isn't deeply explored). Even in cities, people still depended on foraging and hunting just as much as crops.
Idea 2: There are three kinds of human freedom: a) the freedom to move (to pack up and go to a different place if you don't like what's going on where you are--the freedom to leave a community behind and join or start another one), b) the freedom to disobey (to listen to what a leader says and then decide not to do that thing without fear of coercive violence), and c) the freedom to re-organize social relations, including in a community that already exists. In the past few centuries, with the rise of States, we have somehow lost all of these freedoms. The writers rely heavily on indigenous (especially North American Indian) critiques of what we think of a modern Western culture. Many indigenous communities had held onto one or more of these freedoms and were absolutely horrified by European societies when they encountered them because they could see that all those freedoms were gone.
[As an aside: they note that this helps explain why when Europeans were captured by indigenous groups, they overwhelmingly chose to stay with those groups, even if they had the choice to go back to European society. Not to mention many people ran off and "went native" of their own free will. I'm really glad they addressed this because this has been a thing I've spent a lot of time over the years thinking about.]
While some of these indigenous societies were interacting with European societies for the first time and criticizing them, the Enlightenment began, and Europeans started talking about freedom and equality. The authors argue that the indigenous perspective had a profound influence on Enlightenment thinking. But they also kind of say (without outright saying it), that the Enlightenment thinkers didn't really understand the kinds of freedom that indigenous people were so protective of (and that Western ideas of freedom and of property are based around Roman Law, wherein the paterfamilias has total control over the lives of his family and slaves).
Idea 3: The State has no origin. Or...not one origin. "[T]hree principles--call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma--are also the three possible bases of social power. The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral. Usually, all three coexist to some degree. Even in societies where interpersonal violence is rare, one may well find hierarchies based on knowledge."
If you want to understand how hierarchies develop, it helps to consider the three kinds of power that may accumulate in a society, based on the three principles above: a) bureaucratic or administrative power, that runs the day-to-day complicated logistics of a society (control of information), b) sovereignty, the "monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within [a given] territory" (control of violence) and c) political jockeying (individual charisma). They look at a bunch of different societies from the Incas and Mayas to the ancient Egyptians and Minoans and Romans and many other less famous communities, and they examine how some of them develop one or two of the three powers but not the others.
Basically: It is "possible to have monarchs, aristocracies, slavery and extreme forms of patriarchal domination, even without a state," but also: large communities of people do not inevitably lead to those things.
[There's also another theory they float about the interaction of care and power that defines slavery that I think is super interesting, but frankly that should be a whole other book.]
The question they come to at the end is: how did we get "stuck"? How did we come to live in a world in which almost no one has any of the three freedoms, in which we believe that we really don't have much political agency and things are just the way they are, in which we find the idea of equality (a problematic term, they acknowledge) a fantasy? Why did that happen? It wasn't inevitable, that's for sure.
They don't know the answer--or at least they don't provide it here. I know they were set to write further books together, and I'm hopeful that Wengrow will use their unbelievably large amount of notes and finish at least one or two of them, possibly with another writer. I'll really, really miss Graeber's perspective--what a loss!
But anyway, that's why the book feels more like the opening question of a conversation than it does a book that provides answers. I really, really hope that lots of people will engage with this (outside the realm of academia, which most of us have no access to) and explore more of these ideas!
I came away with two main reactions.
Reaction 1: hope that humanity can figure out other ways to live together that don't depend on the subjugation of some and the immense wealth and power of others. Obviously, utopias will never happen, and it's dangerous to think that they will. But things can be so much better--we can regain those three freedoms.
I know this will be a herculean undertaking. Even if we can convince a sizable minority of people that other social arrangements are possible, the actual changing of our societies would take generations and would probably be pretty painful because of the centuries of sediment that have built up around our current State-dominated global society. Inertia is the enemy here. But it is possible. And with climate change, I think it's going to end up happening. I just hope it happens in a less horrific way than I think it could happen.
And of course this isn't a once-and-done kind of thing. As soon as you set up a societal arrangement, you have to start tweaking it. Human communities require constant re-calibration, so the work is never, ever done. But that calibration can happen. And that is so hopeful to me.
Reaction 2: I really need to read up on feminist anthropologists' thoughts on how the patriarchy developed. The reality of patriarchy is a subtle thread throughout the book--it's never the focus, but the authors acknowledge its power. They also address enough societies where women had real freedom (and a few where women were the main decision-makers for their communities) that it's clear that patriarchy and the subjugation of women are absolutely not inevitable. But at the same time, they are so ubiquitous that there's certainly something going on there. I really have no idea where to even begin to find the answer to the question of why men subjugate women. But I need to explore some possible answers. Now that this question is uppermost in my mind, I just cannot continue to live in a world that limits women's power without knowing why that keeps happening over and over throughout human history!
Again, I really recommend this book. If you're intrigued by any of the things you've read here, I think you'll really enjoy reading the way that Graeber and Wengrow support their arguments and why they developed those arguments in the first place. And in the process, you get to learn about just tons of different human cultures and their quirks, including many that you can't find in most popular histories. That's my idea of a good time.
[eta] Wow, that got long. Kudos to anyone who actually reads it all!