The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

There’s only one way out of this dilemma: to create some sort of universal, objective standards by which to measure equality. Since the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, this has almost invariably meant focusing on property arrangements. As we’ve seen, it was only at this point, in the mid to late eighteenth century, that European philosophers first came up with the idea of ranking human societies according to their means of subsistence, and therefore that hunter-gatherers should be treated as a distinct variety of human being. As we’ve also seen, this idea is very much still with us. But so is Rousseau’s argument that it was only the invention of agriculture that introduced genuine inequality, since it allowed for the emergence of landed property. This is one of the main reasons people today continue to write as if foragers can be assumed to live in egalitarian bands to begin with – because it’s also assumed that without the productive assets (land, livestock) and stockpiled surpluses (grain, wool, dairy products, etc.) made possible by farming, there was no real material basis for anyone to lord it over anyone else.