David Graeber is an anthropologist and anarchist who teaches at the London School of Economics. He was a leader of the Occupy Wall Street movement and, unlike many left-wing academics,...

Response from David Graeber: https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/69162/1/Graeber_Eesponse%20to%20Piliavsky_2017.pdf

Editor’s Note: The following review was the result of an extended email exchange between Sarah Neilson and editor Jesse Miller. For more on David Graeber, the politics of play, and assumption-making in critical thought, you can read their conversation below the review.

"A leading modern leftist overlooks the ways the bureaucracy of private industry might actually make the world a better place."

Occupy Wall Street activist David Graeber argues that the right is responsible for red tape in this bleak yet persuasive collection of essays

A sharp, oddly sympathetic and highly readable account of how big government works—or doesn’t work, depending on your point...

Life without bureaucracy sounds wonderful. But are states always and only repressive?

"Given the book’s title: The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, this book is greatly disappointing. The Utopia of Rules isn’t really about rules, utopia, technology, or the secret joys of bureaucracy but is instead a collection of essays addressing the cultural malaise called “modernity."

"In his latest book, The Utopia of Rules, Graeber laments that we have stopped analyzing this aspect of modern life, ceased producing satires and critiques of it like Catch-22 and The Castle. In the meantime, he argues, the U.S. and other Western countries have become more engulfed than ever by rules and regulations controlling nearly every aspect of our lives. We now live in what he calls the "age of total bureaucratization."

"The late David Graeber was one of his kind. An avowed anarchist and activist-academic, his writing was accessible and original. He generally refused to take most mainstream assertions about politics at face value. More importantly, with Graeber, nothing was the final word."

"The future, argues David Graeber, in this fizzing, fabulous firecracker of a book, has been lost somewhere in the past. Instead of manifest technological innovations all we are left with are barren images, postmodern simulacra of futurity. Instead of real creativity and originality, what we have is virtual art and virtual science. And the bad guys in this narrative, the Blue Meanies responsible for stomping on our latent imagination and inventiveness? Bureaucrats."

"A brilliant, creative, and insightful thinker, Graeber sees a transformation of corporate capitalism taking place, over the last several generations, from a type that, to some degree, had protected workers into a meaner, shareholder-dominated system, in which financial interests rule unchallenged."

"The Imperial examination system is a clear example of the kind of bureaucracy David Graeber describes in his new book The Utopia of Rules."

"Superheroes enliven a study of the history of red tape and how it shapes our lives, says Fred Inglis".