Co-author
The Dawn of Everything
The Dawn of Everything is an ambitious reinterpretation of early human social and political history. Rather than offering another single-track account of humanity's supposed ascent from small egalitarian bands through agriculture, cities, states, and entrenched inequality, David Graeber and David Wengrow challenge the idea that these developments formed an inevitable sequence. They assemble archaeological, anthropological, and historical examples suggesting that people repeatedly experimented with different combinations of hierarchy, equality, administration, ritual authority, seasonal leadership, and collective government. The book begins by examining familiar European stories about human origins, particularly narratives associated with Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It then argues that European political thought was partly shaped by Indigenous criticism of European society, giving particular attention to accounts involving the Wendat statesman Kandiaronk. From there, the a…