Where to Start with David Graeber and David Wengrow: A Reading Guide

David Graeber (1961–2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist, professor at the London School of Economics, and author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011). David Wengrow is a British archaeologist at University College London specialising in the ancient Middle East and early human societies. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) was their first collaboration, published shortly after Graeber’s unexpected death at sixty. It became one of the most discussed works of history of its decade.

Where to Start: The Dawn of Everything (2021)

The essential Graeber-Wengrow — and the most significant challenge to the dominant story of human history to appear in decades. The Dawn of Everything opens with a provocation: the standard narrative of human social evolution — the one told by Rousseau, by Steven Pinker, by Jared Diamond, by Yuval Noah Harari — is wrong in its most fundamental premise. The story that humans lived in small, egalitarian bands until agriculture forced them into hierarchy, cities, and states is not supported by the archaeological evidence. The evidence shows something much stranger and more interesting.

The book’s central argument is built from archaeological case studies that do not fit the standard story. At Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, thousands of people lived in a dense urban settlement for over a millennium with no discernible hierarchy — no palaces, no temples, no elite burials, no evidence of a ruling class. In ancient Ukraine, massive Trypillia settlements of fifteen to twenty thousand people appear to have been organised without centralised authority. In North America, the Mississippian cultures built elaborate ceremonial mounds and complex social orders that were later dismantled — hierarchy tried and abandoned. The authors accumulate these examples to argue that human beings have been politically experimental throughout their history, not locked into a single developmental trajectory.

The Rousseau vs. Hobbes debate that structures most popular thinking about human nature and early society — were we naturally peaceful egalitarians corrupted by civilisation, or naturally violent individuals saved by it? — is, they argue, the wrong question. The archaeological evidence suggests that early humans were neither: they were sophisticated political actors who tried many different social arrangements, debated the merits of different systems, and made deliberate choices about how to organise their lives together. The question is not what we were before civilisation but why, given the variety of arrangements that existed, we ended up with the particular combination of inequality and coercive state power that characterises modern societies.

The book is enriched by Graeber’s anthropological work on indigenous critique — the historical evidence that indigenous American intellectuals, encountering European colonists in the seventeenth century, offered sophisticated critiques of European social arrangements that influenced Enlightenment thought. The standard story that Enlightenment thinkers invented the idea of freedom and equality and then exported it to the world is, Graeber and Wengrow argue, a self-congratulatory myth. The dialogue ran both ways.

The Dawn of Everything is demanding reading — 704 pages of closely argued revisionist history — and not all its arguments are equally convincing. Some interpretations of the archaeological record are contested by specialists. But the core challenge it poses to the inevitability narrative of human social development is genuinely important, and the question it leaves the reader with — if hierarchy and inequality were not inevitable, why do we accept them as permanent? — is among the most politically significant any history book has asked in recent years.

Reading David Graeber and David Wengrow

The Dawn of Everything is their essential collaboration. Graeber’s earlier Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) covers the anthropology of debt and money with related revisionist ambition and is the natural companion for readers who want more.

For the full David Graeber and David Wengrow bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the David Graeber and David Wengrow author page on Editors Reads.

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