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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
Scholars' Citation Index
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
"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."
"Perhaps the most salutary lesson of this maddening, wonderful book, then, is that while there is no single answer to the question of how to secure human freedom, the question is one that humans have always asked and, presumably, always will."
"what a gift it is, no less ambitious a project than its subtitle claims ..."
"Graeber and Wengrow cede no ground and fight at every corner ..."
"The Dawn of Everything is a thoroughly mesmerizing book."
"The Dawn of Everything may be less than the sum of its parts, but it's nonetheless a searching, vibrant work that will inspire future researchers to dig deeper into the past."
"For all its historical and theoretical brilliance, The Dawn of Everything does not wholly vindicate the anarchist philosophical framework in which the argument is set."
"Occasionally, Graeber and Wengrow fall into the same kind of biased thinking as the Enlightenment-obsessed men they criticize ..."
"It sits in a different class to all the other volumes on world history we are accustomed to reading."
"The problem with the Graeber/Wengrow thesis is that the assumption that things were better then than they are now is as much a statement of faith as the conventional view."
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