This post is about David Graeber’s book The Utopia of Rules. But that’s not what comes to mind when most people think about Graeber.
Upon his fall 2020 death, many leftists rushed to define the work and legacy of David Graeber. The socialist left tended to focus on his work with Occupy Wall Street and his book Debt. By contrast, the mainstream press focused on the more popular book Bullshit Jobs. And both sides had a word to say about his final book The Dawn of Everything, which formed a kind of grand synthesis of his historical and political views.
That’s all well and good. I’ve read each of these books and written about a couple. Graeber’s work follows a familiar pattern – insightful, but problems tend to lurk.
But I think The Utopia of Rules is where we should go if we want to find Graeber’s most compelling work. In it, he goes after bureaucracy, especially its history and its shaping by the modern world. Though it wanders into the more speculative realms of social theory, it hits a key topic from several angles. And so, that’s our topic for today.
