Why a Different World is Possible: Review of The Dawn of Everything

Abstract

Why a Different World is Possible:Review of The Dawn of Everything James Martel (bio) David Graeber and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Allen Lane, 2021. 704 pp. $18.59 (hc). ISBN 978-0374157357. The Dawn of Everything is a huge, sprawling and deeply ambitious book. Its central thesis is that our current forms of political and economic organization, characterized by hierarchy, state violence and economic exploitation, rather than being the inevitable result of historical forces, are in fact a horrible and accidental phenomenon. Much of this book is devoted to revisiting historical [End Page 403] and prehistorical cases normally used to "prove" that human history has tended towards what I would call archism (the authors do not use this word), our current system of hierarchy and top-down violence. They show that, on the contrary, the vast majority of human history has been marked by high levels of egalitarianism and human freedom, which I would call anarchism (the authors do not use that term either; more on that soon). For me the great upshot of this book is that we are not doomed to archism in all of its awful forms (liberalism, fascism, capitalism etc., etc.) and that a different future, if the human race can survive this present and ongoing debacle, is not only possible, but probable. The two authors of The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber (sadly now deceased) and David Wengrow, survey a vast number of cases, making claims using their respective fields of inquiry: anthropology and archeology. Even their way of writing evinces what I would call an anarchist methodology that permeates and structures this book. Usually, academics are trained to have a thesis and then to use a few (usually three) case studies to "prove" that thesis. This is, almost by definition, a very top-down, and indeed archist approach to scholarship (I was trained this way, as I suspect were most of those reading this). The authors here do something different. They allow a huge number of cases to make their claim via their very diversity and incommensurability (which also explains the heft of the book, at over 700 pages). Here, the variety of the cases is their claim: namely that human beings throughout our history have engaged in endlessly diverse forms of organization, some much more violent than others. Some of these practices entail the same horrors as archism itself, including slavery and endless warfare. The variety recounted in the book does not therefore advance a singular difference between archism and everything else; rather it suggests that archism is just one of an infinite number of possibilities, neither fated nor particularly desirable (in fact it is one of the least desirable forms because it holds virtually all of the negative features and very few of the positive ones). Very often, the authors will show how a situation seemingly parallel to archist forms is nothing of the kind. For example, they speak several times of the case of the Great Sun, the formal leader of the Natchez people, who lived in the territory which is now called Louisiana. In the presence of the Great Sun, people had to wail and tremble and do whatever he said. Yet, his power was restricted to his own village, the Great Village. Elsewhere, people (we can't really call them subjects in this sense) were free to do as they pleased. As a result, the Natchez people went to the Great Village as little as possible and often lived at a distance. When French explorers arrived, they automatically connected the Great Sun to their own king, Louis XIV, the Sun King, but this analogy, as the authors show, is entirely misleading. In fact, the Great Sun is not analogous to French absolute monarchs at all, suggesting once again some of the infinite possible iterations of political life. One by one, the two Davids similarly take down other beliefs sustaining the idea of archism's inevitability. For example, when you actually look at the historical record, the notion that the "agricultural revolution" greatly diminished human freedom as people became less mobile and more vulnerable to stratification is entirely untrue. As the...