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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
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34/99
Critics' Rating Index
74/99
Readers' Rating Index
99/99
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97/99
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About This Book
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.
Reviews
"richly provocative ..."
"Equality, the cherished ideal of most leftists past and present, seems to them a theoretical and strategic dead end, a mere 'technocratic' reform."
"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 ..."
"a lively, and often very funny, anarchist project that aspires to enlarge our political imagination by revitalizing the possibilities of the distant past."
"Yet it succeeds better in uprooting conventional wisdom than in laying down a narrative of its own."
"A fascinating, intellectually challenging big book about big ideas."
"The Dawn of Everything is having numerous debates with itself, not all of them coherent ..."
"a sweeping tour into the past that hops from continent to continent, and from one social sphere to another to tell stories that, depending on the reader's familiarity with the archaeological record, might come as revelations ..."
"This is prose it's easy to surrender to ..."
"The authors are right to question the prevailing mythology in the light of new evidence, but are they right to think that the human condition in which we are, as they keep insisting, 'stuck'—with our banks, wars and political squabbles—is inferior to anything that has gone before?"
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