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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
"This relentless revisionism can be exhilarating, but it's also exhausting ..."
"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."
"A fascinating, intellectually challenging big book about big ideas."
"Whatever its empirical shortcomings, the book must be counted an imaginative success."
"At its best The Dawn of Everything transports us around the globe, aweing with its encyclopedic scope."
"Graeber and Wengrow do not exactly articulate a new narrative to replace the existing one, in part because no such tidy narrative is possible ..."
"It is, in the end, an impressively large undertaking that succeeds in making us reconsider not just the remote past but also the too-close-to-see present, as well as the common thread that is our shifting and elusive nature."
"Vast in scope and dazzling in erudite detail, the book seethes with intriguing ideas; unfortunately, though, the authors' habitual overgeneralizations...undermine confidence in their method of grand speculation from tenuous evidence ..."
"Above all, it is a brief for possibility, which was, for Graeber, perhaps the highest value of all."
"The result is an almost hallucinatory vision of the human epic as a series of idiosyncratic digressions."
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