The Dawn of Everything

by David Graeber and David Wengrow

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Graeber and Wengrow set out to dismantle the linear progress narrative shared by popular big-history books, arguing that prehistoric humans experimented with radically varied forms of social organisation rather than marching inexorably from egalitarian bands to hierarchical states. Drawing on recent archaeology, they attack the Hobbes-vs-Rousseau framing and insist that inequality was a choice, not an inevitability of scale.

Published:: 2021
Pages:: 704

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In the Conversation

In this collection, The Dawn of Everything references 4 other books.

It draws on Sapiens, Guns, Germs, and Steel and The Better Angels of Our Nature.

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What This Book Draws On

The books Wengrow references and why each one mattered to the argument.

The book is explicitly framed as a rebuttal to Harari's Sapiens, whose sketch of a universal shift from foragers to farmers to states Graeber and Wengrow reject as myth-making that flattens archaeological diversity.

References

Sapiens

by Yuval Noah Harari

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Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel is a central target: the authors dispute its geographical-determinist account of Eurasian dominance and argue Diamond underestimates indigenous political imagination.

References

Guns, Germs, and Steel

by Jared Diamond

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Graeber and Wengrow dedicate pages to contesting Pinker's Better Angels, disputing his claim that prehistoric life was uniformly violent and picking apart his use of Yanomami and Gebusi ethnographic anecdotes.

References

The Better Angels of Our Nature

by Steven Pinker

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They challenge the collapse narrative of Diamond's Collapse, arguing that what looks like catastrophic breakdown is often a deliberate political rejection of hierarchy by ancient peoples.

References

Collapse

by Jared Diamond

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Intellectual Lineage

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Directly cites

Sapiens

Guns, Germs, and Steel

The Better Angels of Our Nat...

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2 steps back

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Influence

Justice

The Selfish Gene

The Origin of Species

Unexpected Connections

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