The standard story of human civilization development argues we went from small egalitarian bands, to farming, to cities, and then inevitable hierarchy and the state. Graeber, an anthropologist, and Wengrow, an archaeologist, spent ten years arguing that’s baloney. Evidence shows enormous cities with no palaces and no evidence of rulers, societies that ran hierarchies seasonally and dismantled them in the off season, farming that picked up and dropped for millennia, and Indigenous critics of European society whose arguments shaped the Enlightenment more than anyone admits. Their point is that people used to experiment with how to live and somewhere along the way we got stuck with the Tax Man. What’s unclear is how we get unstuck when the Establishment is so, well, established.
If this had been written by Charles C. Mann, who penned 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, it might have been a page-turner. Instead, it spends 700 pages to land on its conclusion that we were once freer and the path here was complicated.