I finally got around to reading ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’ by the late, great David Graeber and David Wengrow. Graeber was a first-rate anthropologist and leftist thought-leader, and his tragic death during the pandemic was a huge blow to the international left. While Graeber’s ideas were often insightful and revolutionary, his written work was often dry and difficult. While frequently targeting mass-market ‘grand theorists of history’ such as Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari for debunking, he remained firmly grounded in the academic realm. ‘The Dawn of Everything’, a collection of essays and lectures compiled with his collaborator David Wengrow in the ten years prior to his death, is very much of this mould: too interested in debating the ‘big questions’ to be rigorously academic, but too dedicated to the material minutiae and petty historiological disputes to sell a new ‘theory of everything’. In that way, it’s just as frustrating and enlightening as Graeber’s other work, and thus, a fitting final testament.
Let’s begin with the title. Perhaps a more accurate one would have been ‘The Dawn of Inequality: A New Pre-history of Humanity’. Graeber & Wengrow’s primary research question - with the exception of dull, Weberian digression on the birth of the state - is to identify, or at least challenge received accounts of, the origins of inequality. In this, they follow the great tradition of debating liberalism’s theodicy problem - if men are born free, as ideology presumes, why are we now so unequal? Unfortunately, they use as a framing device the ‘debate’ between a fundamentally Hobbesian and Rousseauian narrative of the origins of society - in the former, man is by his nature self-interested and to avoid a life that is nasty, brutish and short, binds himself to the rule of a sovereign. Whereas in the latter, man in his natural state lives in a state of primitive freedom and leisure, which he is seduced into giving up by the material comforts of ‘civilization’.
Graeber & Wengrow point out that this dichotomy, taught to hundreds of thousands of fresh-faced undergrads each year, is dull and limiting. But by framing the book in those same terms they do a huge disservice to the diversity of the ideological debate around liberty and inequality. On the one hand, Hobbes and Rousseau wrote more than a hundred years apart; they were addressing fundamentally different political, economic and ideological contexts and their juxtaposition in this way is an artifact of modern text selection. Moreover, both Hobbes and Rousseau are fundamentally pessimistic writers writing in the social contract tradition, albeit ones with different takes on authority: with Hobbes the authoritarian and Rousseu a sort-of proto-libertarian. Graeber & Wengrow ignore both the more optimistic left-liberal and materialist traditions and the reactionary critique of social-contract theory which sees inequality as a good and natural thing, actually.
A new pre-history of humanity
The other bit of false advertising on the book cover concerns its temporal scope: this is very much a book about ‘pre-history’ - the latest Eurasian civilizations we meet are the Minoan and Mycenaean Greeks, where conventional Western narrative history often begins. Perhaps that’s an intentional choice - after all, human history is much, much longer than recorded in writing. The insights and perspectives that these ancient societies can generate based on scant archaeological evidence are fascinating and represent the best parts of the book. We range all across north and south America, the ancient Middle East and into Eurasia and the Pacific, and while I have absolutely no doubt that Graeber & Wengrow are presenting the absolute cutting-edge in what is known about these societies, facts about them remain frustratingly just out of reach and many of Graeber & Wengrow’s implications are therefore necessary speculative.
At the outset, Graeber & Wengrow offer a convincing narrative about the origins of the inequality question in the European encounter with indigenous America. In this reading, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau did not invent the inequality discourse out of whole cloth, but instead were reflecting upon the perspective that native peoples had of European civilization - perspectives that were, as a result of French colonial empire, now available to bourgeois writers in the metropole. This isn’t quite right - French liberals had plenty of sixteenth-century sources about social contract theory, liberty and equality in both French and English to draw upon. But the Colombian exchange did pose the question of what rights human beings might have simply a consequence of being human - rather than as royal subjects or Christians. And thus, we are told, Rousseau and his contemporaries invented the concept of the state of nature by taking the ‘primitive’ but ‘egalitarian’ lifestyles of the ‘American’ foraging societies they were familiar with as representative. As we learn much later in the book, however, even those north American social bands which most approximated this ideal had adopted this way of life following previous periods of more centralised state-building - their relative egalitarian social structures were a choice, not merely a consequence of ‘underdevelopment’.
Graeber & Wengrow devote considerable space to advocating for a more fluid view of human social arrangements. Social structures are not fixed by material conditions, made irrevocable once a certain technological threshold. Rather, they note, many early societies adopted different modes of organisation at different times of year, coming together for hunts or festivals, and then dispersing, with very different social rules and hierarchies applying in each mode. A ‘king’ may have both the ceremonial and literal power of life and death at certain times of year, or in certain locations, but then be treated little better than an ordinary band-member on the hunt. Farming was not invented all at once, requiring investment in fixed townships, but societies used it from time-to-time as convenient, and abandoned farming just as easily as they invented it. Some hunter-gathering societies are rigidly egalitarian, others fiercely hierarchical. Egalitarian bands may enforce rigid material redistribution, with social rules to punish accumulation, while others encourage creativity and individuality within a materially poor culture.
Graeber & Wengrow also introduce the idea of cultural ‘schismogenesis’, the notion that neighbouring cultures may consciously adopt polarised social practices to create an exclusive sense of identity. In fact, they note that for most of human history, identity groups got smaller rather than larger, with tribes and villages adopting ever-more exclusive notions of group membership and curtailing the previous ‘freedom to roam’ enjoyed by ancient human populations. Examples include the ancient peoples of the California coast, who in the south enforced a rigid culture based on individual industriousness, and in the north fought and took slaves, who did the majority of the manual labour to support an indulgent ruling class. Graeber & Wengrow examine but ultimately dismiss the traditional materialist account of these different social modes, based on different ‘modes of production’ and the availability of surpluses in each ecological zone. Instead, they argue, these differences were a result of self-conscious self-differentiation against the ‘other’.
In short, there was nothing inevitable or pre-determined about the transition from hunter-gather societies, into agriculturally based city societies and the emergence of priestly and ruling classes based on the exploitation of these surpluses. Graeber & Wengrow marshall truly impressive evidence about the first cities, pre-dating those in Mesopotamia and Egypt by thousands of years, to show that massive groups of people - numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands - could organise themselves quasi-democratically and without leaving any evidence of social hierarchies over timescales of many hundreds of years. While everyone knows Tenochtitlan, capital of the ‘blood-thirsy’ Aztecs, few know the name of Teotihuacan, a city of 125,000 people organised on egalitarian lines merely 40kms away that flourished over a thousand years prior with pyramid-building just as, if not moreso, impressive. Graeber & Wengrow present documentary evidence to show that Europeans exploring the Americans fundamentally misunderstood that many of the cities they encountered were governed as republics, with rhetorical and political traditions vastly more sophisticated than were practiced in Europe at the time. Their evidence is very clear that warrior aristocracies usually tended to arise in frontier zones - forests, mountains and hills - and only move into cities later as conquerors. And just as importantly, the archaeological records show hints of the first revolutions against tyranny, thousands of years before Rome and the Gracchi.
Against the evolutionists
All well and good. But apart from their [understandable but irritating] abuse of European philosophy as a framing device, Graeber & Wengrow also take aim at another subject close to my heart by being highly critical of what they call social ‘evolutionism’. For Graeber & Wengrow, social evolutionary theory is synonymous with a certain late-nineteenth century, ‘progressive’ view of human societies as inexorably and inevitably moving through a series of fixed stages towards the capitalist mode of development. They note that almost the entire field of sociology - from the Marxist to Hayekian - rejects this kind of simplification entirely, yet Graeber & Wengrow continue to argue against it, arguing that it reflects what sociologists ‘really think’. While that may be right in some sense - people to love their simplifying categories after all, even bespectled academics - employing such crude caricatures a great disservice to cultural evolutionary theory.
Because, in fact, the kind of diversity and experimentation that Graeber & Wengrow identify is precisely the variation that a modern evolutionary perspective would expect to see in human history. What is missing entirely from Graeber’s account is the function of selectors in history - what makes these societies fail. We are told repeatedly that once-glorious cities are abandoned, and people move away. But why? We never know, and Graeber & Wengrow make scant mention of the role of war, disease and environmental change in history. It’s frustrating that in discussing the origin of the state, the role of war and war-making is barely mentioned. Perhaps the emergence of the state in the seemingly mono-typical form we know it today is precisely the consequence of these selective pressures being applied on an initially more diverse population. A true history of humanity would need to account for the emergence of the capitalist nation-state as a consequence of the large-scale European warfare and brutal colonial extraction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
For Graeber & Wengrow, social arrangements always come back to a matter of ‘choice’ - not just individual choice per se, but the social choice of groups over time. Frustratingly, we are given no information, or even a theory, about how such choices might be made an implemented; given Graeber’s anarchist background, there’s a sort of perpetual wink-and-a-nod towards idea of community autonomy and self-governance. While the notion of social outcomes as social choices is certainly useful from a critical activitist perspective - it allows us to argue that another world is possible - it is not materially grounded. For Graeber & Wengrow, equality is an idea that we must choose. They do not, and cannot, engage from this perspective in this with well-established liberal problems such as a nature of regime legitimacy, conflicts between the choices of the past and the desire of the current generation, and our fundamental lack of choice about the kind of society we are born into with limited ability to change.
A recommendation, with caution
Did I enjoy ‘The Dawn of Everything’? Yes. Did I learn things about human deep history from it, that I have not read elsewhere? Once again, yes. But am I persuaded that Graeber & Wengrow have genuinely offered a new ‘history [or even, gasp, a theory] of humanity’ that fundamentally challenges the staid and false dichotomy of Hobbes vs Rousseau? No. Unfortunately not. Like ‘Debt: the first 5,000 years’ or ‘Bullshit Jobs’, ‘The Dawn of Everything’ is full of interesting ideas that do not come together a cohesive whole, and which may one day be picked apart by serious academic critique. But for an undergraduate encountering these ideas for the first time, it offers a useful and engaging corrective to hundreds of years of propaganda that the inequality we see around us is somehow either natural or inevitable.