The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Wengrow is a comparative archeologist; he teaches at University College London and has been a visiting professor at New York University and distinguished visitor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His specialty is conducting fieldwork in various regions in Africa and the Middle East. He has published several works, including What Makes Civilization?: The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West, published in 2010, and The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published in 2014. His scholarship is primarily focused on the emergence of the first civilizations and states, as well as the cultural creations, such as writing and art, that arise from these early social arrangements. As the title of the first publication listed above makes clear, Wengrow is interested in the ways in which the earliest human societies provide a framework of possibilities for the modern world—as in the basic premise of The Dawn of Everything. He has received recognition for his scholarship, including the Antiquity Prize, awarded by the journal Antiquity for outstanding work in the field of archeology.

Wengrow writes, in his “Foreword and Dedication” to The Dawn of Everything, that he and Graeber had conceived of the project as a series of works: “Realizing we didn’t want to end the intellectual journey that we’d embarked on, and that many of the concepts introduced in this book would benefit from further development and exemplification, we planned to write sequels: no less than three” (ix). Whether Wengrow will continue the work on his own is uncertain. As he also notes in this introduction to the book, “[w]e would often lose track of who came up with what idea or which new set of facts and examples [. . .] The result is not a patchwork but a true synthesis” (ix).

Hobbes is an influential political philosopher and erstwhile historian. Born in England just before the famous defeat of the Spanish Armada under Queen Elizabeth I and living through the English Civil War (1642-1651) and Interregnum (1649-1660) periods, Hobbes witnessed some of the most tumultuous events in English history, shaping his rather pessimistic political beliefs. His most famous work, Leviathan, was published during the Civil War, in 1651. Its most famous line—that life is “nasty, brutish, and short”—has been quoted and parsed for centuries. Graeber and Wengrow argue that Hobbes’s influence still impacts political thinking today, by making “wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense” (7). That influence, they suggest, obscures the facts now being uncovered in their respective fields; these facts instead suggest that humans have had a great deal more agency in building societies and creating civilizations according to their own very specific value systems.

Hobbes’s philosophy essentially makes the importance of the state—its sovereign and administrative control—loom especially large over human societies. That is, without the force and control of the state, humans exist in a continuous state of warfare over resources and supremacy: “The political implications of the Hobbesian model need little elaboration,” Graeber and Wengrow write. “It is a foundational assumption of our economic system that humans are at base somewhat nasty and selfish creatures, basing their decisions on cynical, egotistic calculation rather than altruism or cooperation” (6). Graeber and Wengrow aim to disrupt the Hobbesian influence over the story of human history, showing that much recent evidence reveals the success of early egalitarian communities throughout the world. Human societies, it seems, are more capable of altruism than Hobbes, with his shattering experiences of Civil War and exile, could imagine.