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By the time David Graeber passed away suddenly in 2020 at the age of 59, he had already become a folk hero to many. Trained as an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, Graeber became best known as a key figure in the Occupy Movement, which expressed the discontent of many in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, the subsequent government bailout of banks and the concurrent disregard for ordinary people who were deprived of any form of government assistance. Though the tent encampment in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street became a symbol of the movement, the Occupy protests, which took hold globally, were deeply informed by ideas of direct democracy, mutual aid, debt cancellation and autonomous zones beyond state control – in short, the basic philosophical tenets of anarchism. Frequently credited with coining the expression, “We Are the 99%,” which in true anarchist fashion he objected to, Graeber’s larger intellectual contribution was to mainstream this political philosophy in numerous ways. In contrast to the nineteenth-century stereotype of violent anarchism promoted by Mikhail Bakunin, Graeber viewed anarchism as both a solution to present day problems of state capture by elites, as well as a philosophy that had deep historical roots and universal reach across societies around the world. Rather than being nihilistic, anarchism in Graeber’s view fostered community through actions of assistance and consensus building.

Confused? The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…, a new collection of Graeber’s writings, provides answers. Beyond the Occupy Movement, Graeber was a prolific and lively writer who addressed a range of topics and locales through essays and books that breached the divide between academic and non-academic audiences. With their titles alone, works like Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2015) and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018) give a sense of his playful style in approaching subjects like debt, bureaucracy and work that can come across overly mundane, at least on the surface. As further examples of his ambition, two posthumous works, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) co-authored with David Wengrow, and Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (2023), provide nothing less than an anarchist account of human civilization and a non-Western history of enlightenment, respectively. Graeber was seemingly inexhaustible in his ability to tackle issues large and small, well-known and obscure. The 18 chapters in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World… reaffirm his talent as an unusual, though assured, guide through a diversity of matters, including office jobs, giant puppets and Western civilization, that become far more interesting in his hands.

Indeed, Graeber is not one for brevity, and his voice on the page is as memorable as his ideas. A number of these chapters go on at length. Nonetheless, several interrelated themes emerge across The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World… that index broader patterns throughout his work. The first theme is Graeber’s concern to denaturalize assumptions about received ideas, which is beautifully illustrated in his opening chapter on the idea of Western civilization. The longest essay in the book, “There Never Was a West,” contends that the most cherished principles of Western civilization like popular democracy are not the intellectual property of Europe or the United States, but emerged and have thrived elsewhere. It is a bravura piece of argumentation that starts with the Greeks and ends with the Zapatistas en Chiapas in southern Mexico.

A second theme is Graeber’s concern for the experiences and fates of ordinary people. This emphasis is not necessarily original, but it enlivens his discussion of economics, for example, making an inevitably dry academic topic full of real life and everyday meaning. His essay, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” starts with a prognosis by John Maynard Keynes in 1930 that the average work week would shrink for most Americans due to technological advances, though, as we all know, the exact opposite has happened. Graeber sees the escalation of work being taken up by the administrative sector – financial services, marketing, public relations and so-called “human resources” – creating what he calls “bullshit jobs,” a type of ill-defined work that is designed solely for “the sake of keeping us all working.” He takes parallel aim at the mind-numbing nature of bureaucracy in the more academic chapter, “Dead Zones of the Imagination,” in which he skewers bureaucratic procedure for “ignoring all the subtleties of real social existence.”

The third theme found across The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World… is anarchism as a philosophy and solution to the social ills that Graeber observes. He is certainly not the first to critique modern alienation, whether in its economic or political guises, but his anarchist approach is less common, requiring both insistent explanation and a joie de vivre that goes against existing perceptions of this worldview. “Chances are you have already heard something about who anarchists are and what they are supposed to believe. Chances are almost everything you have heard is nonsense,” Graeber writes at the start of his essay, “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!” He continues, “Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction…. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.” From this opening premise, Graeber goes on to discuss how anarchist ideals of self-organizing, consensus decision-making and mutual respect often manifest in daily situations like waiting in line for a bus, participating in a sports team or teaching children to share. “Every time you have the opportunity to force someone to do something, but decide to appeal to their sense of reason or justice instead, you are being an anarchist,” he writes. “The same goes for every time you share something with a friend, or decide who is going to do the dishes, or do anything at all with an eye to fairness.”

The upshot is that Graeber seeks to denaturalize how anarchism is often negatively understood, thus circling back to the first theme. In this chapter and others, including two insightful interviews, he consistently views its principles as enabling people to take action to improve their lives without state assistance or wholesale societal change. In his purview, radical transformation is possible on a smaller, though no less meaningful, scale. Indeed, to fill in the ellipsis of its title, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…, Graeber once wrote, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” Taken alone, this statement may come across as unbearably saccharine. Yet, during a period of political polarization today, when every election seems like a cliffhanger or a fait accompli, Graeber’s urging that we see politics in a broader social sense, untied to electoral calendars and state institutions, appears refreshing, even liberating.

In this way, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World… provides both a balm and a course of action. It is a worthy representation of Graeber’s key interests and ideas. More importantly, it demonstrates how he confronted the issues of our time as an intellectual challenge and a political necessity. Graeber was an idealist for sure. Still, during a time of pessimism when options for change appear woefully limited, his outlook and spirit offer a degree of much-needed respite.