This rather weighty tome from David Graeber and David Wengrow – The Dawn of Everything – got lots of attention upon its late 2021 release. I’ll call them the Davids. Some of the attention arrived due to the untimely death of David Graeber. He brought us a number of modern anarchist-leaning leftist classics. Topics range from ‘bullshit jobs’ to rules and debt.
But this book also arrived in a timely way. Insofar as the public hears grand historical narratives, they come from sources like Jared Diamond or Steven Pinker. Diamond and Pinker present a certain ‘standard narrative’ of history. For them, history proceeds in stages: from simplicity to complexity, from agriculture to industry, from ‘primitive stateless society’ to empire, and so on.
The Davids question all this in The Dawn of Everything. And they do some other things. Let’s see how it works out for them.
