Rossi, Enzo; de Dijn, Annelien; Mccall, Grant; Wengrow, David; Widerquist, Karl; (2024) Material conditions and human freedom: David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). Contemporary Political Theory 10.1057/s41296-024-00681-5. (In press).

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Abstract

Much of the debate surrounding David Graeber and David Wengrow’s landmark contribution, The Dawn of Everything (2021, hereafter DOE), has focused on the book’s key historical claims: that complexity in human societies need not imply hierarchy, that Indigenous North America had significant influence on the European Enlightenment, that there was no irreversible “agricultural revolution,” let alone an irreversible transition to state-like polities, and that there is no discernible sequence of “stages” of human history, since for much of our history we experimented freely with a great variety of political and economic arrangements. Rather than adding to the chorus of those who wish to probe the book’s empirics, I focus on the more abstract social-theoretic picture that emerges from Graeber and Wengrow’s empirical claims.

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