The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

As a matter of fact, Rousseau, unlike Hobbes, was not a fatalist. For Hobbes, all things large and small in history were to be understood as the unfolding of forces set in motion by God, which are ultimately beyond the capacity of humans to control (see Hunter 1989). Even a tailor making a garment is entering, from his first stitch, into a flow of historical entanglements that he is powerless to resist and of which he is largely unaware; his precise actions are tiny links in a great chain of causality that is the very fabric of human history, and – in this rather extreme metaphysics of entanglement – to suggest that he might have been doing these things some alternative way is to deny the whole, irreversible course of world history. For Rousseau, by contrast, what humans make, they could always unmake, or at least do differently. We could free ourselves from the chains that bind us; it just wasn’t going to be easy (see, again, Shklar 1964 for a classic discussion of this aspect of Rousseau’s thought).