Book Review— The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

In 2013’s The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement, the late David Graeber, anthropologist and Founding Father of the Occupy Wall Street movement, defines democracy as “the belief that human beings are fundamentally equal and ought to manage their collective affairs in an egalitarian fashion, using whatever means appear most conducive to that, and the hard work of bringing arrangements based on those principles into being.”

In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Graeber and co-author David Wengrow account the post-industrial world decidedly undemocratic, a place where what passes for democracy “is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlookers.”

Over the course of 700 pages, Graeber & Wengrow take a deep dive into the historical and archeological record to debunk much of the conventional wisdom concerning societal evolution as they meditate on “how humans came largely to lose the flexibility and freedom that seems once to have characterized our social arrangements, and ended up stuck in permanent relations of dominance and subordination.”

You know how the story goes: once upon a time we were all nomads, hunting and gathering and not much else. Then we domesticated animals and learned how to farm, which created food surpluses, which led to permanent settlements, which as they grew required ever more complex forms of top-down administration. It’s a linear evolutionary model, cutting up humanity’s march to today as an orderly succession of eras and game-changing events — the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age; the Agricultural Revolution, the Urban Revolution, the Industrial Revolution. The political apotheosis arrives in the late 18th century with the good ol’ U.S. of A. and its government of/by/for the people, with liberty and justice for all, yadda yadda.

Most of that, say Graeber & Wengrow, is poppycock, premised on a conception of human nature that is “all just an endless repetition of a story first told by Rousseau in 1754” and propped up by intellectual laziness in the form of a) presuming that because we are where we are, things had to end up this way; and b) an almost willful ignorance of ever-accumulating evidence that there is neither an ‘original’ form of human society nor a straightforward progression of societal forms. “[H]uman beings really have spent most of the last 40,000 or so years moving back and forth between different forms of social organization,” say G&W. “It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and never did.” However, “Blinded by the ‘just so’ story of how human societies evolved, [historians, anthropologists, etc.] can’t even see half of what’s now before their eyes.”

By sheer number of words, the bulk of The Dawn of Everything reviews that evidence, much of which has been accumulated over the last 30 years by way of technological advances in the field of archeology (Wengrow’s métier). But however necessary it may be to martial a host of counterexamples to give the lie to assertions (such as by anthropologists like Robin Dunbar and Jared Diamond) “that once societies scale up they will need […] ‘chiefs to direct, and a police force to ensure that social rules are adhered to’ [and that] ‘large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws,’” all that evidence can make The Dawn of Everything quite a slog. How much do you really want to hear about Upper Paleolithic burials or the layout of Teotihuacan or the wide geographic circulation of certain types of shell beads?

But G&W aren’t doing this just to show us they’re better researchers than most of their brethren: they need us to understand how different even two contemporaneous, neighboring societies could be from each other so we grasp the concept they call schismogenesis, “the broad tendency […] for human beings to further subdivide, coming up with endless new ways to distinguish themselves from their neighbors.” It’s this tendency, they say, that led some societies to structure themselves in ways that were antithetical to their relatively egalitarian neighbors. “[W]e cannot really understand the rise of what we have come to call ‘the state’ — and specifically of aristocracies and monarchies — except in the larger context of that counter reaction. […] Aristocracies, perhaps monarchy itself, first emerged in opposition to the egalitarian cities of the Mesopotamian plains.”

Ultimately, The Dawn of Everything is “mainly about freedom,” and G&W say it was by giving up our “three primordial freedoms” — the freedom to move, to disobey, and to “create or transform the social relationship” — that the ‘state’ as we know came into being. This was achieved via “three principles of domination” — violence, knowledge, and charisma — control of which resulted in the “combination of sovereignty, bureaucracy and a competitive political field” that defines the modern state.

How an elite few (let’s call them the 1%) came to dominate so effectively is of course another part of the story (and it has more than a little to do with misogyny) — but the reason G&W have gone to so much trouble to lay all this out for us is that they believe we may not be as stuck with what we have as we take for granted — and even that the three principles of domination which together have held us in such thrall may be unraveling as we speak, presenting us with prime opportunity to reframe our social relations. “If anything is clear by now,” they say, it’s this:

Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave it, forever), what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart. Seen this way, to rethink the basic premises of social evolution is to rethink the very idea of politics itself.

Part and parcel of such rethinking is to recognize, per sociologist Philip Abrams, that “the state is ‘not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.’ To understand the latter […] we must attend to ‘the senses in which the state does not exist rather than to those in which it does.’”

And if we truly recognize that the modern state as we know it does not exist as an inevitable consequence of our living together in large groups, G&W hope that maybe, just maybe, we can reclaim enough of our freedom to create a more egalitarian reality:

In developing the scientific means to know our own past, we have exposed the mythical substructure of our ‘social science’ — what once appeared unassailable axioms, the stable points around which our self-knowledge is organized, are scattering like mice. What is the purpose of all this new knowledge, if not to reshape our conceptions of who we are and what we might yet become? If not, in other words, to rediscover the meaning of our third basic freedom: the freedom to create new and different forms of social reality?