The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

‘good’ and ‘evil’ are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

could be for the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in ‘civilization’ and ‘the state’ – which also meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms.

Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651, is in many ways the founding text of modern political theory. It held that, humans being the selfish creatures they are, life in an original State of Nature was in no sense innocent; it must instead have been ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ – basically, a state of war, with everybody fighting against everybody else.

There’s a reason why, in English, the words ‘politics’ ‘polite’ and ‘police’ all sound the same – they’re all derived from the Greek word polis, or city, the Latin equivalent of which is civitas, which also gives us ‘civility,’ ‘civic’ and a certain modern understanding of ‘civilization’.

it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.

One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent ‘big picture’ of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts.

The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.

by way of an attempt to explore a fundamental paradox of human politics: how is it that our innate drive for freedom somehow leads us, time and again, on a ‘spontaneous march to inequality’?

Despite all this, many modern writers treat Leviathan in the same way others treat Rousseau’s Discourse – as if it were laying the groundwork for an evolutionary study of history; and although the two have completely different starting points, the result is rather similar.

We can take Pinker as our quintessential modern Hobbesian. In his magnum opus, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2012), and subsequent books like Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) he argues that today we live in a world which is, overall, far less violent and cruel than anything our ancestors had ever experienced.

Since, like Hobbes, Pinker is concerned with the origins of the state, his key point of transition is not the rise of farming but the emergence of cities. ‘Archaeologists’, he writes, ‘tell us that humans lived in a state of anarchy until the emergence of civilization some five thousand years ago, when sedentary farmers first coalesced into cities and states and developed the first governments.’14 What follows is, to put it bluntly, a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along. You might hope that a passionate advocate of science would approach the topic scientifically, through a broad appraisal of the evidence – but this is precisely the approach to human prehistory that Pinker seems to find uninteresting. Instead he relies on anecdotes, images and individual sensational discoveries, like the headline-making find, in 1991, of ‘Ötzi the Tyrolean Iceman’.

When it comes to cherry-picking anthropological case studies, and putting them forward as representative of our ‘contemporary ancestors’ – that is, as models for what humans might have been like in a State of Nature – those working in the tradition of Rousseau tend to prefer African foragers like the Hadza, Pygmies or!Kung. Those who follow Hobbes prefer the Yanomami.

Pinker tells us, is the kind of dismal fate ordained for us by evolution. We have only escaped it by virtue of our willingness to place ourselves under the common protection of nation states, courts of law and police forces; and also by embracing virtues of reasoned debate and self-control that Pinker sees as the exclusive heritage of a European ‘civilizing process’, which produced the Age of Enlightenment (in other words, were it not for Voltaire, and the police, the knife-fight over Chagnon’s findings would have been physical, not just academic).

The idea that our current ideals of freedom, equality and democracy are somehow products of the ‘Western tradition’ would in fact have come as an enormous surprise to someone like Voltaire. As we’ll soon see, the Enlightenment thinkers who propounded such ideals almost invariably put them in the mouths of foreigners, even ‘savages’ like the Yanomami. This is hardly surprising, since it’s almost impossible to find a single author in that Western tradition, from Plato to Marcus Aurelius to Erasmus, who did not make it clear that they would have been opposed to such ideas. The word ‘democracy’ might have been invented in Europe (barely, since Greece at the time was much closer culturally to North Africa and the Middle East than it was to, say, England), but it’s almost impossible to find a single European author before the nineteenth century who suggested it would be anything other than a terrible form of government.23

There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is.

One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great thoughts, but these ‘great thinkers’ are assumed to perform both these activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.

Many influential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim that some of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from Native American sources – even though, predictably, intellectual historians today insist this cannot really be the case.

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

Even in the Garden of Eden, as the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas observed, Adam clearly outranked Eve. ‘Social equality’ – and therefore, its opposite, inequality – simply did not exist as a concept. A recent survey of medieval literature by two Italian scholars in fact finds no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus. So one cannot even say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social equality: the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them.6 In fact, the terms ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe’s discoveries in the New World.

The Jesuit Relations are full of this sort of thing: scandalized missionaries frequently reported that American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will. This, for the Jesuits, was an outrage. Such sinful conduct, they believed, was just the extension of a more general principle of freedom, rooted in natural dispositions, which they saw as inherently pernicious. The ‘wicked liberty of the savages’, one insisted, was the single greatest impediment to their ‘submitting to the yoke of the law of God’.23 Even finding terms to translate concepts like ‘lord’, ‘commandment’ or ‘obedience’ into indigenous languages was extremely difficult; explaining the underlying theological concepts, well-nigh impossible.

A. R. J. Turgot, and we happen to have a copy of his reply – which was long and highly (if constructively) critical. Turgot’s text could hardly be more important, since it marks a key moment in his own intellectual development: the point where he began to turn his most lasting contribution to human thought – the idea of material economic progress – into a general theory of history.

theories of social evolution – now so familiar that we rarely dwell on their origins – first came to be articulated in Europe: as a direct response to the power of indigenous critique. Within a few years, Turgot’s breakdown of all societies into four stages was appearing in the lectures of his friend and intellectual ally Adam Smith in Glasgow, and was worked into a general theory of human history by Smith’s colleagues: men like Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson and John Millar. The new paradigm soon began to have a profound effect on how indigenous people were imagined by European thinkers, and by the European public more generally.

What’s more, there was a strong emphasis in ancient Roman (and modern European) law on the self-sufficiency of households; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of the will, but being in no way dependent on other human beings (except those under one’s direct control).

manifesto of the Secret Order of the Illuminati, a network of revolutionary cadres organized within the Freemasons by a Bavarian law professor named Adam Weishaupt. The organization did exist in the late eighteenth century; its purpose was apparently to educate an enlightened international, or even anti-national, elite to work for the restoration of freedom and equality. Conservatives almost immediately denounced the Order, leading to it being banned in 1785, less than ten years after its foundation, but right-wing conspiracists insisted it continued to exist, and that the Illuminati were the hidden hands pulling the strings behind the French Revolution (or later even the Russian). This is silly, but one reason the fantasy was possible is that the Illuminati were perhaps the first to propose that a revolutionary vanguard, trained in the correct interpretation of doctrine, would be able to understand the overall direction of human history – and, therefore, be capable of intervening to speed up its progress.54

bête noire

The phrase ‘noble savage’ was in fact popularized a century or so after Rousseau, as a term of ridicule and abuse. It was deployed by a clique of outright racists, who in 1859 – as the British Empire reached its height of power – took over the British Ethnological Society and called for the extermination of inferior peoples.

Rousseau has been accused of many crimes. He is innocent of most of them. If there is really a toxic element in his legacy, it is this: not his promulgation of the image of the ‘noble savage’, which he didn’t really do, but his promulgation of what we might call the ‘myth of the stupid savage’ – even if one he considered blissful in its state of stupidity. Nineteenth-century imperialists adopted the stereotype enthusiastically, merely adding on a variety of ostensibly scientific justifications – from Darwinian evolutionism to ‘scientific’ racism – to elaborate on that notion of innocent simplicity, and thus provide a pretext for pushing the remaining free peoples of the world (or increasingly, as European imperial expansion continued, the formerly free peoples) into a conceptual space where their judgements no longer seemed threatening. This is the work we are trying to undo.

Everyone agrees that equality is a value; no one seems to agree on what the term actually refers to. Equality of opportunity? Equality of condition? Formal equality before the law?

But self-conscious ideas of ‘equality’, putting equality forward as an explicit value (as opposed to an ideology of freedom, or dignity, or participation that applies equally to all) appear to have been relative latecomers to human history. And even when they do appear, they rarely apply to everyone.

What’s more to the point is that Athenian intellectuals at the time, who were mostly of aristocratic background, tended to consider the whole arrangement a tawdry business, and most of them much preferred the government of Sparta, ruled by an even smaller percentage of the total population, who lived collectively off the labours of serfs. Spartan citizens, in turn, referred to themselves as the Homoioi, which could be translated either as ‘the Equals’ or ‘Those Who Are All the Same’ – they all underwent the same rigorous military training, adopted the same haughty disdain for both effeminate luxuries and individual idiosyncrasies, ate in communal mess halls and spent most of their lives practising for war.

This is not, then, a book about the origins of inequality. But it aims to answer many of the same questions in a different way. There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. To understand how this situation came about, we should trace the problem back to what first made possible the emergence of kings, priests, overseers and judges. But we no longer have the luxury of assuming we already know in advance what the precise answers will turn out to be. Taking guidance from indigenous critics like Kandiaronk, we need to approach the evidence of the human past with fresh eyes.

Those elements that make up modern humans – the relatively uniform ‘us’ referred to above – seem only to have come together quite late in the process. In other words, if we think humans are different from each other now, it’s largely illusory; and even such differences as do exist are utterly trivial and cosmetic, compared with what must have been happening in Africa during most of prehistory.

Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that, in terms of ancestry, we are all Africans.

In other words, there is no ‘original’ form of human society. Searching for one can only be a matter of myth-making, whether the resultant myths take the form of ‘killer ape’ fantasies that emerged in the 1960s, seared into collective consciousness by movies like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; or the ‘aquatic ape’; or even the highly amusing but fanciful ‘stoned ape’ (the theory that consciousness emerged from the accidental ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms). Myths like these entertain YouTube watchers to this day.

Much of the evidence for this ‘revolution’ is restricted to a single part of the world: Europe, where it is associated with replacement of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens around 40,000 BC. It includes more advanced toolkits for hunting and handicrafts, the first clear evidence for the making of images in bone, ivory and clay – including the famous sculpted ‘female figurines’,11 dense clusters of carved and painted animal figures in caves, often observed with breathtaking accuracy; more elaborate ways of clothing and decorating the human body; the first attested use of musical instruments like bone flutes; regular exchange of raw materials over great distances, and also what are usually taken as the earliest proofs of social inequality, in the form of grand burials.

As Christopher Boehm puts it, we seem doomed to play out an endless recycling of the war between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’: those who view humans as either innately hierarchical or innately egalitarian.

The solution to the battle between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’ turns out to be: our genetic nature is Hobbesian, but our political history is pretty much exactly as described by Rousseau. The result? An odd insistence that for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened. This is an unsettling conclusion, especially when we consider some of the actual archaeological evidence for the existence of ‘Palaeolithic politics’.

So not only was everyone living in bands until farming came along, but these bands were basically ape-like in character. If this seems unfair to the author, remember that Harari could just as easily have written ‘as tense and violent as the nastiest biker gang’, and ‘as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a hippie commune’. One might have imagined the obvious thing to compare one group of human beings with would be … another group of human beings. Why, then, did Harari choose chimps instead of bikers? It’s hard to escape the impression that the main point of difference is that bikers choose to live the way they do. Such choices imply political consciousness: the ability to argue and reflect about the proper way to live – which is precisely, as Boehm reminds us, what apes don’t do. Yet Harari, like so many others, chooses to compare early humans with apes anyway.

What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic. Ancient philosophers tended to be keenly aware of all this: that’s why, whether they were in China, India or Greece, they tended to write their books in the form of dialogues.

What we’d now call political consciousness was always assumed to come first. In this sense, the Western philosophical tradition has taken a rather unusual direction over the last few centuries. Around the same time as it abandoned dialogue as its typical mode of writing, it also began imagining the isolated, rational, self-conscious individual not as a rare achievement, something typically accomplished – if at all – after literally years of living isolated in a cave or monastic cell, or on top of a pillar in a desert somewhere, but as the normal default state of human beings anywhere.

over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was political self-consciousness that European philosophers came to see as some kind of amazing historical achievement: as a phenomenon which only really became possible with the Enlightenment itself, and the subsequent American and French Revolutions. Before that, it was assumed, people blindly followed traditions, or what they assumed to be the will of God. Even when peasants or popular rebels rose up to try to overthrow oppressive regimes they couldn’t admit they were doing so, but convinced themselves they were restoring ‘ancient customs’ or acting on some kind of divine inspiration.

That is, just as they pretended a ‘rational Western individual’ (say, a British train guard or French colonial official) could be assumed to be fully self-aware all the time (a clearly absurd assumption), they argued that anyone classified as a ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ operated with a ‘pre-logical mentality’, or lived in a mythological dreamworld. At best, they were mindless conformists, bound in the shackles of tradition; at worst, they were incapable of fully conscious, critical thought of any kind.

everyone at least pays lip service to the psychic unity of mankind. But in practice, as we’ve seen, little has changed. Scholars still write as if those living in earlier stages of economic development, and especially those who are classified as ‘egalitarian’, can be treated as if they were literally all the same, living in some collective group-think: if human differences show up in any form – different ‘bands’ being different from each other – it is only in the same way that bands of great apes might differ. Political self-consciousness, or certainly anything we’d now call visionary politics, would have been impossible.

Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages, and watching them argue with one another, tend to be well aware that even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as sceptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments. A few, such as the early-twentieth-century scholar Paul Radin in his 1927 book Primitive Man as Philosopher, ended up concluding that at least those he knew best – Winnebago and other Native North Americans – were actually, on average, rather more thoughtful.

What the existence of similar seasonal patterns in the Palaeolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. It might be useful here to look back at this forgotten anthropological literature, with which Lévi-Strauss would have been intimately familiar, to get a sense of just how dramatic these seasonal differences might be.

The authors begin by observing that the circumpolar Inuit ‘and likewise many other societies … have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer, Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single male elder. During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin – much more so than the Nambikwara chiefs in the dry season. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. Then, Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Sea.

Franz Boas

Here, Boas discovered, it was winter – not summer – that was the time when society crystallized into its most hierarchical forms, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastline of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over compatriots classified as commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations – still ranked, but with entirely different and much less formal structures. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter – literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year.

One of his students, a Viennese-born ethnographer named Robert Lowie (who was also a close friend of Paul Radin, author of Primitive Man as Philosopher) did fieldwork among the Mandan-Hidatsa and Crow people of what are now Montana and Wyoming, and spent much of his career thinking through the political implications of seasonal variation among nineteenth-century tribal confederacies on the Great Plains.