An Encyclopedia of Political Forms

Abstract

In the preface to his Second Discourse, on the origin of inequality and whether or not it could be justified by natural law, Rousseau cast a disapproving eye over the ample contemporary literature on the topic: “Among the most serious writers, one can hardly find two who are of the same opinion on this point. Without speaking of the ancient philosophers, who seem to have tried their best to contradict each other on the most fundamental principles” (Rousseau 1992 [1755]: 13). In The Dawn of Everything (2021), the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow breathe new life into this classical polemical tradition. They begin by criticizing the current fashion for essays that appeal to the immemorial past to justify their frequently banal and conservative analysis of the present. Steven Pinker, Yuval Harari, Robin Dunbar, Jared Diamond, Walter Scheidel, Francis Fukuyama, and Ian Morris are explicitly named as so many variations on the liberal mystification of social evolution. Graeber and Wengrow's self-proclaimed “new history of humanity,” however, runs the risk of leaving the reader with the same disappointment the author of the Second Discourse expressed over the proliferation of unwarranted stances. It is worthwhile, therefore, stating very clearly, and from the start, what separates this particular text from its peers.