The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

In their 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow work to upend numerous entrenched assumptions about the origins of complex human societies, urban settlements and nation-states, and the global problem of social inequality.

An anthropologist and archeologist, respectively, the authors examine the latest archeological evidence and reinterpret decades of anthropological study to provide detailed accounts of how early human societies developed. Their project is to reject the traditional narrative that small hunter-gatherer bands of humans lived in egalitarian harmony before they discovered agriculture, settled down, scaled up their populations and implemented hierarchical systems of administrative and political control. Instead, the authors argue that organizing processes were much more complex and reveal a significant level of conscious self-determination.

Released by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2021, The Dawn of Everything has sparked lively debate among scholars and armchair historians alike.

Summary

The authors discuss the lingering influence of two early political philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), over historical scholarship and anthropological study. The authors refute both thinkers, proposing another way of looking at early human history and its contributions to the present.