A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change.

By William Deresiewicz

A fascinating, intellectually challenging big book about big ideas

Seeking to change the present by reinterpreting the past, a new book puts its agenda before accuracy.
Robert Henderson
November 19, 2021 The Social Order

A sweeping new history of humanity upends the story of civilization, inviting us to imagine how our own societies could be radically different.

Emily Kern

A contrarian account of our prehistory argues that cities once flourished without rulers and rules—and still could.
By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

November 1, 2021

Review of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Allen Lane, 2021)

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s anarchist history of humanity.
By Daniel Immerwahr SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s new history of humanity looks for the origins of authoritarianism and freedom.

In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow search for historical examples of nonhierarchical societies to justify their anarchist vision of human freedom. But must we find our future in the past?

Everyone from Yuval Noah Harari to Steven Pinker is savaged in this revolutionary look at where we came from

This imaginative attempt to reconfigure humanity’s roots contends that early people were free to shape their own lives

The late David Graeber’s history of early human societies presents civilisation as a descent from anarchy into servility. But was man ever free?

Social evolution, from Ice Age hunter-gatherer networks to ancient Egypt’s pyramid-building dynasties and beyond, gets reinterpreted in a new book as a series of flexible systems that didn’t inevitably produce rampant inequality.

OSAMA ELSAYED/UNSPLASH

“This sweeping and novel synthesis exploring the arc of the human condition— its highly diverse forms of political organizing, and the future that lays in store for us—may well prove to be the most important book of the decade. For it explodes deeply held myths about the inevitability of our social lives dominated by the state.”

An archaeologist and an anthropologist dismantle received wisdom about the way early societies operated

By David Priestland, October 23, 2021

An essential reminder that we are in charge of our own destiny.