The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

This last point is critical, because – as outlined earlier – we are used to imagining that the very notion of a people self-consciously creating their own institutional arrangements is largely a product of the Enlightenment. Obviously, the idea that nations could be effectively created by great lawmakers such as Solon of Athens, Lycurgus in Sparta or Zoroaster in Persia, and that their national character was in some sense a product of that institutional structure, was a familiar one in antiquity. But we are generally taught to think of the French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu as the first to build an explicit and systematic body of theory based on the principle of institutional reform with his book The Spirit of the Laws (1748). By doing so, it’s widely believed, he effectively created modern politics. The Founding Fathers of the United States, all avid readers of Montesquieu, were consciously trying to put his theories into practice when they attempted to create a constitution that would preserve the spirit of individual liberty, and spoke of the results as a ‘government of laws and not of men’. As it turns out, precisely this sort of thinking was commonplace in North America well before European settlers appeared on the scene. It might not be a coincidence, in fact, that in 1725 a French explorer named Bourgmont brought an Osage and Missouria delegation across the Atlantic to Paris, around the time Lahontan’s works were at the heig...