David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on September 2, 2020. David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and has been a visiting professor at New York University. He is the author of several books, including What Makes Civilization?. Wengrow conducts archaeological fieldwork in various parts of Africa and the Middle East.
"Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years
that is not only wildly different from anything we're used to, but
also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical,
inspiring . . . It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of
history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline
of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete
with political experiment and creativity."
--William Deresiewicz, The Atlantic "[An] iconoclastic and
irreverent new book . . . an exhilarating read."
--David Priestland, The Guardian (UK) "An instant
classic . . . Fatalistic sentiments about human nature melt away
upon turning the pages . . . [The Dawn of Everything] sits in a
different class to all the other volumes on world history we are
accustomed to reading . . . If comparisons must be made, they
should be made with works of similar caliber in other fields, most
credibly, I venture, with the works of Galileo or Darwin. Graeber
and Wengrow do to human history what the first two did to astronomy
and biology respectively."
--Giulio Ongaro, Jacobin "A boldly ambitious work that seems
intent to attack received wisdoms and myths on almost every one of
its nearly 700 absorbing pages . . . entertaining and
thought-provoking . . . 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."
--Andrew Anthony, The Observer (UK) "The Dawn of
Everything is a lively, and often very funny, anarchist project
that aspires to enlarge our political imagination by revitalizing
the possibilities of the distant past . . . It disavows the
intellectual trappings of a knowable arc, a linear structure, and
internal necessity. As a stab at grandeur stripped of grandiosity,
the book rejects the logic of technological or ecological
determinism, structuring its narrative around our ancestors'
improvisatory responses to the challenges of happenstance."
--Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker "[The Dawn of Everything]
took as its immodest goal nothing less than upending everything we
think we know about the origins and evolution of human societies .
. . [the book] aims to synthesize new archaeological discoveries of
recent decades that haven't made it out of specialist journals and
into public consciousness."
--Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times "A fascinating, radical,
and playful entry into a seemingly exhaustively well-trodden genre,
the grand evolutionary history of humanity. It seeks nothing less
than to completely upend the terms on which the Standard Narrative
rests . . . erudite, compelling, generative, and frequently
remarkably funny . . . once you start thinking like Graeber and
Wengrow, it's difficult to stop."
--Emily M. Kern, Boston Review "Our forebears crafted their
societies intentionally and intelligently: This is the fundamental,
electrifying insight of The Dawn of Everything. It's a book that
refuses to dismiss long-ago peoples as corks floating on the waves
of prehistory. Instead, it treats them as reflective political
thinkers from whom we might learn something."
--Daniel Immerwahr, The Nation "The Dawn of Everything is an
upbeat book . . . Prehistory, Graeber and Wengrow insist, is vastly
more interesting than scholars knew until recently. And not just
more interesting, but more inspiring as well . . . this book
testifies to David Graeber's admirable energy, imagination, and
love of freedom."
--George Scialabba, The New Republic "The book's 704 pages
teem with possibilities. They are a testament, in the authors'
view, to human agency and invention -- a capacity for conscious
political decision-making that conventional history ignores."
--Molly Fischer, New York Magazine "This book is a bomb that
explodes everything we've ever believed about the history of the
human race."
--Ken Follett, Daily Mail "Sentence by sentence, [The
Dawn of Everything] is clear and forceful and funny, memorable
in the manner of a lecture by the kind of professor whose students
know they are lucky . . . The authors have organized a profusion of
ideas, details, and explanatory paradigms into a vast but
comprehensible design, while never ceasing to delight and
instruct."
--Phil Christman, Commonweal Magazine "The premise is
exhilarating, and its implications are only beginning to be
considered. . . . [You] get the sense that a political
consciousness is an artistic consciousness. This view enables us to
look at works of art with renewed optimism, as little windows into
alternative ways of living rather than 'artificial hells.' . . . At
a moment when so many artists, curators, and academics are eager to
"decenter the human" in their work, The Dawn of Everything invites
us to do the (much harder) job of reframing the braided questions
of what humankind was, is, and could be."
--Simon Wu, Artforum "A startlingly new picture of our shared
past: messier and more complicated, flush with diversity,
experimentation, and, above all, freedom . . . A culmination of
Graeber's lifelong project, as well as a testament to the power of
intellectual collaboration . . . A new origin story of human
societies, one with a horizon beyond our present
disillusionment."
--Jared Spears, Yes! Magazine "Brainy . . . the latest--and
most provocative--in a line of Big History: bold, panoptic works
that offer to explain the whole sweep of man's story . . . [as]
passionate as you'd expect from a decade-long labor of
love--conceived by two learned and mischievous men."
--Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal "A fascinating
argument about why humans today are 'stuck' in rigid, hierarchical
states that would have appalled our ancestors . . . a fitting
capstone to [Graeber's] career . . . The Dawn of Everything begins
as a sharp rejoinder to sloppy cultural analysis and ends as a
paean to freedoms that most of us never realized were available.
Knowing that there were other ways to live, Graeber and Wengrow
conclude, allows us to rethink what we might yet become."
--Annalee Newitz, The Washington Post "Ambitious, polemical
and subversive . . . intellectually formidable . . . stimulating
entertainment fueled by skepticism, a voracious appetite for
research and a sense of humor. Their writing style--conversational
and tantalizing, even in copious footnotes in which they call out
contemporary anthropologists--keeps the reader absorbed . . .
fundamentally encouraging."
--Carlo Wolff, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "An engrossing series
of insights into how 'the conventional narrative of human history
is not only wrong, but quite needlessly dull'."
--Anthony Doerr, The Guardian "[A] sense of revelation
animates this provocative take on humankind's social journey."
--Bruce Bower, Science News "Graeber and Wengrow hope to show
that human imagination and possibility is broader and more hopeful
than we let ourselves believe."
--Noah Berlatsky, NBC News "Wengrow and Graeber's project has
been to show how alternatives of social and economic organization
have been a deep part of our ancestry all along . . . No recent
book is gaining faster traction in the artworld right now. Artists,
take note."
--Art Review "This sweeping and novel synthesis exploring the arc
of the human condition . . . may well prove to be the most
important book of the decade, for it explodes deeply held myths
about the inevitability of our social lives dominated by the state.
It is at once a sophisticated analysis packaged in accessible prose
that moves briskly in the unfolding tale of humanity's many forms
of being and becoming."
--James H. McDonald, New York Journal of Books "With vivid
narrative prose and rich detail... [The Dawn of Everything]
take[s] readers on a myth-busting journey through the inner
workings of prehistoric and historic societies around the world,
showcasing the remarkable intelligence and agency of ancient
peoples and the diverse societal solutions that they helped shape .
. . Like Graeber, The Dawn of Everything is a rabble-rouser--a
great book that will stimulate discussions, change minds, and drive
new lines of research."
--Erle C. Ellis, Science "A thoroughly mesmerizing book . . .
There are almost unlimited possibilities here to build upon . . .
If there are any lessons to be drawn from the past, it is that
almost any cultural software can be run on human hardware. As
Graeber and Wengrow compellingly demonstrate, this suggests a
tantalizing range of possibilities for organizing the political
world."
--Matthew Porges, Los Angeles Review of Books "The Dawn
of Everything, chockablock with archaeological and ethnographic
minutiae, is an oddly gripping read. Graeber, who did his fieldwork
in Madagascar, was well known for his caustic wit and energetic
prose, and Wengrow, too, has established himself not only as an
accomplished archaeologist working in the Middle East but as a
gifted and lively writer . . . an imaginative success . . . At its
core is a fascinating proposal about human values, about the nature
of a good and just existence."
--Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books "An
ingenious new look at 'the broad sweep of human history' and many
of its 'foundational' stories . . . [Graeber and Wengrow] take a
dim view of conventional accounts of the rise of civilizations,
emphasize contributions from Indigenous cultures and the missteps
of the great Enlightenment thinkers, and draw countless
thought-provoking conclusions . . . A fascinating, intellectually
challenging big book about big ideas."
--Kirkus Reviews [starred review] "Pacey and potentially
revolutionary . . . the argument of the book is firmly based on a
deluge of recent evidence that suggests that pre-agricultural
societies were complex, that agriculture was not the sudden turning
point it is claimed to be and, most importantly, that large,
successful systems such as cities have been run without central,
rule-giving controllers . . . This is more than an argument about
the past, it is about the human condition in the present."
--Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times (UK) "The Dawn of
Everything reimagines the human story from its earliest
beginnings. Easily one of my favorite books of the year, every
chapter left me with something to chew over. This is one of those
books that will challenge you to reconsider everything."
-Emily B., Powells.com
"As new discoveries upend what we think we know about human
history, it is time to jettison old narratives and tell new stories
about ancestors who were as human--and thus as vibrant, intelligent
and complicated--as ourselves. Graeber and Wengrow take on this
task with verve and passion."
--Philip Deloria, co-editor of A Companion to American Indian
History "Graeber and Wengrow have effectively overturned everything
I ever thought about the history of the world. A thorough and
elegant refutation of evolutionary theories of history, The Dawn of
Everything introduces us to a world populated by smart, creative,
complicated people who, for thousands of years, invented virtually
every form of social organization imaginable and pursued freedom,
knowledge, experimentation, and happiness way before the
"Enlightenment." The authors don't just debunk the myths, they give
a thrilling intellectual history of how they came about, why they
persist, and what it all means for the just future we hope to
create. The most profound and exciting book I've read in thirty
years."
--Robin D.G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History,
UCLA, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast. There is not a
single chapter that does not (playfully) disrupt well seated
intellectual beliefs. It is deep, effortlessly iconoclastic,
factually rigorous, and pleasurable to read."
--Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author The Black Swan "The Dawn
of Everything is also the radical revision of everything,
liberating us from the familiar stories about humanity's past that
are too often deployed to impose limitations on how we imagine
humanity's future. Instead they tell us that what human beings are
most of all is creative, from the beginning, so that there is no
one way we were or should or could be. Another of the powerful
currents running through this book is a reclaiming of Indigenous
perspectives as a colossal influence on European thought, a
valuable contribution to decolonizing global histories."
--Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark and
Orwell's Roses
"Not content with different answers to the great questions of human
history, Graeber and Wengrow insist on revolutionizing the very
questions we ask. The result: a dazzling, original, and convincing
account of the rich, playful, reflective, and experimental symposia
that 'pre-modern' indigenous life represents; and a challenging
re-writing of the intellectual history of anthropology and
archaeology. The Dawn of Everything deserves to become the port of
embarkation for virtually all subsequent work on these massive
themes. Those who do embark will have, in the two Davids,
incomparable navigators."
--James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and
Anthropology ('Demeritus'), Yale University, author of Seeing
Like a State
"Synthesizing much recent scholarship, The Dawn of Everything
briskly overthrows old and obsolete assumptions about the past,
renews our intellectual and spiritual resources, and reveals,
miraculously, the future as open-ended. It is the most bracing book
I have read in recent years."
--Pankaj Mishra, author of The Age of Anger
"Graeber and Wengrow take up a question as old as Rousseau--the
origin of social inequality--only to reveal that it predates
Rousseau and may in fact be the wrong question, based on rubbish
history and reactionary speculation. Scavenging through the most
up-to-date archaeological research and most recent anthropological
record, the authors give us a world more various and unexpected
than we knew, and more open and free than we imagine. This is
social theory in the grand, old-fashioned sense, delivered with
spell-binding velocity and an exhilarating sense of discovery."
--Corey Robin, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
"A fascinating inquiry, which leads us to rethink the nature of
human capacities, as well as the proudest moments of our own
history, and our interactions with and indebtedness to the cultures
and forgotten intellectuals of indigenous societies. Challenging
and illuminating."
--Noam Chomsky "Graeber and Wengrow debug cliches about
humanity's deep history to open up our thinking about what's
possible in the future. There is no more vital or timely
project."
--Jaron Lanier, author of Dawn of the New
Everything
"Fascinating, thought-provoking, groundbreaking. A book that will
generate debate for years to come."
--Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for
Realists
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