Author: David Graeber and David Wengrow · Published: 2021 · Genre: History, Anthropology, Archaeology
The Dawn of Everything argues that early humans were not stuck on a simple march from small egalitarian bands to farms, cities and kings, but experimented with many ways of organizing society, often deliberately. Its biggest strength is the sheer range of archaeological and ethnographic evidence it throws at that familiar story. Its biggest weakness is that it sometimes reads more certainty into ambiguous evidence than its sources allow, and several respected scholars have said so in detail. Read it if you enjoy big-picture history and can handle a long, argumentative book with a critical eye.
The core ideas
- Hobbes versus Rousseau is the wrong question. The authors, an anthropologist and an archaeologist, reject both the brutish-savage story and the innocent-state-of-nature story. Asking about the origins of inequality assumes a single original condition that humanity then fell from, and they argue the evidence doesn’t support one.
- The indigenous critique. They argue that Enlightenment debates about freedom and equality were shaped partly by Native American critics of European society, especially the Wendat statesman Kandiaronk, whose views reached French readers through the Baron de Lahontan’s published dialogues.
- Seasonal politics. Some societies switched structures through the year. Inuit groups lived under patriarchal authority in summer and in more communal arrangements in winter; some Plains peoples appointed police for the buffalo hunt and disbanded them afterward. People, they argue, have long been conscious political actors.
- Farming and cities without kings. Agriculture, they argue, spread slowly and unevenly over thousands of years rather than in one sudden revolution. They also point to large early settlements with little sign of rulers, such as the Ukrainian mega-sites of more than 5,000 years ago, and a phase at Teotihuacan when the city seems to have turned from pyramid-building toward good-quality housing for ordinary residents.
- Three lost freedoms. The freedom to move away, to disobey, and to reorganize society. Their real question is not how inequality began but how we got stuck in one arrangement.
What’s great
The detail is a pleasure. The chapters on Mesopotamian assemblies, Teotihuacan and the Ukrainian sites are full of findings most readers have never met, and they unsettle the tidy textbook sequence. The authors write with energy and humor, and they take direct aim at popular big-history writers such as Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari, which gives the book a clear point of view.
Its deeper achievement is a change of question. Instead of treating the past as a slope toward the present, it asks readers to see earlier people as experimenters making choices. Even many skeptics grant that this is a useful corrective.
The controversy
The reception has been sharply divided. Kwame Anthony Appiah, reviewing it in the New York Review of Books, praised its detail but pointed to places where the book’s claims go beyond what its cited sources say. The historian David A. Bell argued that Lahontan’s dialogues were largely a literary device, so treating Kandiaronk’s speeches as a faithful record overstates the case; he also faulted the book’s portrait of Rousseau. Walter Scheidel and others said it neglects material explanations, and some archaeologists accused it of picking examples that fit while skipping counter-examples.
Many of these disputes are about interpretation rather than outright error. Whether a site without palaces was truly egalitarian, or simply left no trace of its elite, is often an open question, and the authors tend to present the hopeful reading with more confidence than the field has reached. Supporters reply that the standard story rests on thin evidence too, which is a fair point.
The book is also long, repetitive and polemical. Graeber died in September 2020, soon after the manuscript was finished, and the central question of how humans got stuck is raised more than it is answered.
Who should read it
Readers of Sapiens or Guns, Germs, and Steel who want a strong counterargument should read this next. Treat it as a provocative case rather than a settled consensus, and read at least one of the critical reviews alongside it.
Rating: 4/5
Image credits — Featured image: cover image via Open Library; cover design © the publisher, shown for review purposes. In-article images: Image by Teomancimit via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
