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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by
34/99
Critics' Rating Index
74/99
Readers' Rating Index
99/99
Scholars' Citation Index
97/99
Volume of Reviews
96/99
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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
"Graeber and Wengrow, while providing no definitive answers, cast grave doubts on those theories that have been advanced to date."
"this isn't a book that attempts to be scientifically accurate, whatever that might mean."
"This is prose it's easy to surrender to ..."
"Yet there is a distinct sense of cherrypicking, of stringing together examples that fit the broad sweep of their argument, and dismissing the rest ..."
"At the same time, because hardly a paragraph goes by without bequeathing insight, this is a book that requires to be patiently taken in."
"Surely it is not necessary to choose between freedom and equality, much less to disparage those who make the opposite choice."
"It's hard not to wonder whether this book, which zips merrily across time and space and hypothesizes confidently in the face of scant or confusing evidence, can be trusted."
"Is it not more likely that all humans are stuck in the condition of being too self-aware to find peace?"
"G&W drag Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, and Yuval Noah Harari to the woodshed for writing big dumb books about how society works that regurgitate fundamental errors about early human history ..."
"a glorious mess of a book that nonetheless upends platitudes about early human communities and power disparities that have persisted through the ages."
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