The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

If nothing else, these preoccupations help to explain the continued relevance of an otherwise not particularly successful eighteenth-century Swiss musician named Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Those primarily concerned with the first question saw him as the first to ask it in a quintessentially modern way. Those mainly concerned with the second were able to represent him as the ultimate clueless villain, a simple-minded revolutionary who felt that the established order, being irrational, could simply be brushed aside. Many held Rousseau personally responsible for the guillotine. By contrast, few nowadays read the ‘traditionalists’ of the nineteenth century, but they’re actually important since it is they, not the Enlightenment philosophes, who are really responsible for modern social theory. It’s long been recognized that almost all the great issues of modern social science – tradition, solidarity, authority, status, alienation, the sacred – were first raised in the works of men like the theocratic Vicomte de Bonald, the monarchist Comte de Maistre, or the Whig politician and philosopher Edmund Burke as examples of the kind of stubborn social realities which they felt that Enlightenment thinkers, and Rousseau in particular, had refused to take seriously, with (they insisted) disastrous results.

The Enlightenment is seen as introducing a possibility that had simply not existed before: that of self-conscious projects for reshaping society in accord with some rational ideal. That is, of genuine revolutionary politics. Obviously, insurrections and visionary movements had existed before the eighteenth century. No one could deny that. But such pre-Enlightenment social movements could now largely be dismissed as so many examples of people insisting on a return to certain ‘ancient ways’ (that they had often just made up), or else claiming to act on a vision from God (or the local equivalent).

Still, we must be cautious. While human beings have always been capable of physically attacking one another (and it’s difficult to find examples of societies where no one ever attacks anyone else, under any circumstances), there’s no actual reason to assume that war has always existed. Technically, war refers not just to organized violence but to a kind of contest between two clearly demarcated sides. As Raymond Kelly has adroitly pointed out, it’s based on a logical principle that’s by no means natural or self-evident, which states that major violence involves two teams, and any member of one team treats all members of the other as equal targets. Kelly calls this the principle of ‘social substitutability’7 – that is, if a Hatfield kills a McCoy and the McCoys retaliate, it doesn’t have to be against the actual murderer; any Hatfield is fair game. In the same way, if there is a war between France and Germany, any French soldier can kill any German soldier, and vice versa. The murder of entire populations is simply taking this same logic one step further. There is nothing particularly primordial about such arrangements; certainly, there is no reason to believe they are in any sense hardwired into the human psyche. On the contrary, it’s almost invariably necessary to employ some combination of ritual, drugs and psychological techniques to convince people, even adolescent males, to kill and injure each other in such systematic yet indiscriminate ways.

Insofar as these and other polities commonly regarded as ‘early states’ (Shang China, for instance) really share any common features, they seem to lie in altogether different areas – which brings us back to the question of warfare, and the loss of freedoms within society. All of them deployed spectacular violence at the pinnacle of the system (whether that violence was conceived as a direct extension of royal sovereignty or carried out at the behest of divinities); and all to some degree modelled their centres of power – the court or palace – on the organization of patriarchal households. Is this merely a coincidence? On reflection, the same combination of features can be found in most later kingdoms or empires, such as the Han, Aztec or Roman. In each case there was a close connection between the patriarchal household and military might. But why exactly should this be the case?

The question has proved difficult to answer in all but superficial terms, partly because our own intellectual traditions oblige us to use what is, in effect, imperial language to do so; and the language already implies an explanation, even a justification, for much of what we are really trying to account for here. That is why, in the course of this book, we sometimes felt the need to develop our own, more neutral (dare we say scientific?) list of baseline human freedoms and forms of domination; because existing debates almost invariably begin with terms derived from Roman Law, and for a number of reasons this is problematic.

An answer is suggested by the West Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson, who points out that Roman Law conceptions of property (and hence of freedom) essentially trace back to slave law.9 The reason it is possible to imagine property as a relationship of domination between a person and a thing is because, in Roman Law, the power of the master rendered the slave a thing (res, meaning an object), not a person with social rights or legal obligations to anyone else. Property law, in turn, was largely about the complicated situations that might arise as a result. It is important to recall, for a moment, who these Roman jurists actually were that laid down the basis for our current legal order – our theories of justice, the language of contract and torts, the distinction of public and private and so forth. While they spent their public lives making sober judgments as magistrates, they lived their private lives in households where they not only had near-total authority over their wives, children and other dependants, but also had all their needs taken care of by dozens, perhaps hundreds of slaves. Slaves trimmed their hair, carried their

On the one hand, freedom and liberty were private affairs; on the other, private life was marked by the absolute power of the patriarch over conquered people who were considered his private property.

What is both striking and revealing, for our present purposes, is how in Roman jurisprudence the logic of war – which dictates that enemies are interchangeable, and if they surrendered they could either be killed or rendered ‘socially dead’, sold as commodities – and, therefore, the potential for arbitrary violence was inserted into the most intimate sphere of social relations, including the relations of care that made domestic life possible.

Prisoner sacrifice was not merely about reinforcing the solidarity of the group but also proclaimed the internal sanctity of the family and the domestic realm as spaces of female governance where violence, politics and rule by command did not belong. Wendat households, in other words, were defined in exactly opposite terms to the Roman familia.

Public torture, in seventeenth-century Europe, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to convey the message that a system in which husbands could brutalize wives, and parents beat children, was ultimately a form of love. Wendat torture, in the same period of history, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to make clear that no form of physical chastisement should ever be countenanced inside a community or household. Violence and care, in the Wendat case, were to be entirely separated. Seen in this light, the distinctive features of Wendat prisoner torture come into focus.

To view human history through such a lens today is really not all that different from taking on the mantle of a modern-day King James, since the overall effect is to portray the violence and inequalities of modern society as somehow arising naturally from structures of rational management and paternalistic care: structures designed for human populations who, we are asked to believe, became suddenly incapable of organizing themselves once their numbers expanded above a certain threshold.

After all, those things really did exist, even if our habitual ways of looking at the past seem designed to put them at the margins rather than at the centre of things. Much of this book has been devoted to recalibrating those scales; to reminding us that people did actually live in those ways, often for many centuries, even millennia. In some ways, such a perspective might seem even more tragic than our standard narrative of civilization as the inevitable fall from grace. It means we could have been living under radically different conceptions of what human society is actually about. It means that mass enslavement, genocide, prison camps, even patriarchy or regimes of wage labour never had to happen. But on the other hand it also suggests that, even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.

We began this book with a quote which refers to the Greek notion of kairos as one of those occasional moments in a society’s history when its frames of reference undergo a shift – a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles and symbols, when the lines between myth and history, science and magic become blurred – and, therefore, real change is possible. Philosophers sometimes like to speak of ‘the Event’ – a political revolution, a scientific discovery, an artistic masterpiece – that is, a breakthrough which reveals aspects of reality that had previously been unimaginable but, once seen, can never be unseen. If so, kairos is the kind of time in which Events are prone to happen.