The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Sahlins’s essay, perhaps the last truly great example of that genre of ‘speculative prehistory’ invented by Rousseau, first appeared in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes.18 It made the argument that, at least when it comes to working hours, the Victorian narrative of continual improvement is simply backwards. Technological evolution has not liberated people from material necessity. People are not working less. All the evidence, he argued, suggests that over the course of human history the overall number of hours most people spend working has tended instead to increase. Even more provocatively, Sahlins insisted that people in earlier ages were not, necessarily, poorer than modern-day consumers. In fact, he contended, for much of our early history humans might just as easily be said to have lived lives of great material abundance.