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This is the second new book that David Graeber, the anthropologist and anarchist, has published since his death aged fifty-nine in late 2020, and that his thoughts continue to surprise, challenge and confuse us says a great deal about the depth of his intellectual creativity. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World is an entertaining smorgasbord of his ideas, drawn from various essay collections and articles and interviews with him, edited by his wife and co-author, Nika Dubrovsky.

Some of the entries are cautious and academic while others are more journalistic and polemical. The virally successful “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” (2013) – which helped to bring his work to popular attention and was later expanded into a book, Bullshit Jobs (2018) – encompasses both styles. Most of the time, it is hard to draw a clear line between Graeber’s scholarly insights and his political activism. Perhaps, though, that is how he thought it ought to be. As Dubrovsky writes in her introduction to the book, Graeber was an “anarchist-scholar”, the two parts of his life fused in a way that could not be easily disentangled.

“Anthropologists”, Graeber writes in one essay, “are drawn to areas of density.” This book reflects that observation: it is dense, disorientating in its richness and range, moving quickly over vast areas of terrain. There are passing references to medieval Iceland, pirate ships and Native American confederations; quick asides about Swazi Ncwala ritual and Zande witchcraft; fleeting discussions of Algonkian refusals to adopt Inuit kayaks and Inuit refusals to adopt Algonkian snowshoes. Nods are made to Herderian and Hegelian processes, Marxian and Maussian tradition. We confront unexplained terms like “schizmogenesis” (which refers to the process by which social divisions form and is derived from cybernetic systems theory).

If there is a common theme, it is the author’s relish for attacking conventional wisdom. Thus, we learn that there never was a West; that anarchism and democracy are the same; that a state can never be democratic. (A leading figure in the Occupy movement, Graeber helped to coin the slogan “We are the 99%”.) The author has little respect for the traditional boundaries between scholarly disciplines and he is happy to traverse them himself: he believes that philosophers have got consciousness wrong, that political scientists have got anarchy wrong, that ethologists have got animal play wrong. This contrarian streak carries him to dangerous places. “It…