 | By Rachel Poser Sunday Review Editor, Opinion |
When I first spoke with David Graeber and David Wengrow more than a year ago, they were eating schnitzel in an Austrian cafe in London — two friends having a rather heavy lunch, planning to change the course of human history. |
Wengrow is an archaeologist at University College London, and, at the time, Graeber was an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, a beloved activist-scholar best known for his book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years." They were animated by the excitement of new discovery; they moved from table to table at the cafe, trying to find a good enough internet connection to tell me about the book they were writing, which they promised would overturn centuries of conventional wisdom about the origins of social inequality. |
The conventional wisdom they hoped to overturn is that, when it comes to human society, complexity and inequality go hand in hand. This idea was first put forward by the Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Enlightenment, and it appears today, in an updated form, in the work of "big history" writers like Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama and Yuval Noah Harari. |
Over the course of human history, these writers argue, as societies become larger and more sophisticated, they also become more hierarchical. Once early humans invented agriculture and congregated in cities, they also divided themselves into kings and peasants, lords and serfs, masters and slaves. |
Graeber and Wengrow spent the last decade disproving that idea by researching archaeological sites all over the world — from Mesoamerica to China. A guest essay published this week in Times Opinion, which was adapted from their book, "The Dawn of Everything," argues that "a surprising number of the world's earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines." |
For Graeber and Wengrow, this is not just about getting history right. Their findings have profound implications for our politics today. How are we ever going to solve the problem of inequality in the modern world, they ask in their book, if we believe that it is simply the price of living in large groups — in vibrant cities like New York, London and Shanghai? |
Graeber, who was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and is credited with coining the slogan "We are the 99 percent," spent his career marshaling history to help us imagine a better future. He and Wengrow tell a story that is startlingly optimistic — one that emphasizes human agency, creativity and experimentation. "Far from resigning ourselves to inequality," they write, "the new picture that is now emerging of humanity's deep past may open our eyes to egalitarian possibilities we would otherwise never have considered." |
Graeber died unexpectedly in Venice in September 2020, at age 59, barely three weeks after he and Wengrow wrote the final chapter of their book, and long before they could write the three sequels they had planned. When they spoke to me from the cafe earlier that year, I could sense how much fun they were having — I could feel the heat of two minds that spark when brought together. It is painful to think about the loss of those volumes and everything else Graeber would have done in the coming decades. |
He had the capacity to take reality apart and reorder it before your eyes, revealing new patterns, perspectives and, most of all, possibilities. "The Dawn of Everything" is sure to provoke debate as experts in specific regions weigh in on the authors' global conclusions, but the book, like all of Graeber's work, serves as a much-needed reminder that we make our world — and that we have the power to change it. |
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