The late anthropologist maintains that the pirate culture of Madagascar was a major influence on thinkers like Hobbes and Locke.

David Graeber’s posthumous book, “Pirate Enlightenment,” is a reminder of the joys of reading the popular anthropologist.

In his last book, the iconoclastic anthropologist David Graeber considers evidence that maritime outlaws created utopian political communities on the island in the Indian Ocean.

Nika Dubrovsky speaks to Noam Chomsky about pirate societies, ‘bewildered herds’ and the fragility of the present in the context of the late anthropologist David Graeber’s final book

An anthropologist argues that experimental communities in Madagascar influenced the European Enlightenment

"In the last of his publications, Graeber writes in Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia about the role of pirates in developing some of the core tenets of the Enlightenment. He pulls from the ethnographic field research that he conducted for his doctoral thesis in Madgascar, beginning what he thought would be an extended essay that turned in the process into a short book. He wields a host of different accounts of the time period, contending with their contradictions and mythological slants to create a tentative narrative about the Golden Age of Piracy."

The true, swashbuckling lives of matriarchs, anarchists, and pirates at the crossroads of the world.

"Before he became a swashbuckling public intellectual, his work focused on Madagascar, where he did doctoral research on the legacy of slavery in a highlands village. In his posthumous new book, Pirate Enlightenment, or The Real Libertalia, he returns to the subject of Madagascar to tell a story that challenges Eurocentric ideas about the origins of the Enlightenment."

"Pirate Enlightenment or the Real Libertalia has been published posthumously. Graeber writes he had the choice between presenting this work as a long essay or a short book and chose the latter. At times, therefore, he appears to be stretching his material. That is not to detract from the leap of the imagination he asks us to take with him. Graeber surfs an idea, enjoying its energy without worrying where or how it might make landfall."

"In his last book, David Graeber argued that pirates were far more enlightened than we might think".

"Along similar lines, in Pirate Enlightenment, a concise and elegant tract published after his untimely death, Graeber, a self-described anarchist, makes the case that long before European scholars first advanced their vision of liberal democracy, 17th-century Indian Ocean pirates and the Madagascar settlements they influenced produced relatively free and egalitarian civil societies, espousing “a profoundly proletarian version of liberation, necessarily violent and ephemeral."

A case for swashbucklers in Madagascar first discovering the ideals of reason, liberty and toleration

"The posthumous publication of “Pirate Enlightenment” shows how the anarchist, like any true intellectual, never grew out of his childhood passions."