Review by Fred Inglis on the Times Higher Education
Jun 2013
The Democracy Project by David Graeber.
"Rationality yields to sentimentality in an Occupy Wall Street-inspired call for direct action"
David Graeber is man of the moment in London and New York, prominent in the pages of Harper’s, The Guardian and, bless us all, The Wall Street Journal; Anglo-American and inexcusably self-styled “radical anthropologist”; author of that racy and compelling book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
To our incredulous amazement, he has come to tell us that the Occupy Wall Street moment of direct action was an important victory in the common rediscovery of democratic participation, broken up only by means of illegal, clandestine and brutal violence on the part of the police, as were the fraternal insurrections that swept across North Africa and the Middle East, with echoes in popular protest against unspeakable misery in India, Sri Lanka and Burma.