I should start by acknowledging that this is a hard book for me to review honestly and thoroughly. First, it’s long and dense! I’m not sure I would have made it through if it hadn’t been via audiobook, and even then, I was sometimes listening at 3x speed to make it through before my loan expired. I know I missed some details along the way. Second, these authors are clearly making a big argument that takes on much of the received wisdom in fields like anthropology and archaeology. I have zero training in either of these fields, so even if I had followed every detail, I wouldn’t be able to evaluate the argument against other findings and arguments in the literature.

So, I’m kind of evaluating this on vibes. I appreciate the argument the authors are making, and it (mostly) resonates with me on political and philosophical levels. You can tell the anarchist influences the authors are bringing to the text, and that makes this an interesting addition to my exploration of that thinking. I also deeply appreciate the authors’ approach to the philosophy of science for the ways it resonates with my own. All of this makes me predisposed to agree with the argument even as I’m unsuited to evaluate the evidence. I’m still going to review the book, but I want to acknowledge my shortcomings in doing so.

Five or so years ago, I read Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens and really enjoyed it. I’m fascinated with questions of early humanity, since they touch on life, the universe, and everything in ways that I’m not used to. Like the present book, I felt like I wasn’t really able to evaluate Sapiens thoroughly, but I appreciated the way it made me think. The one thing that troubled me about the book was the way it seemingly set humanity on a path of inevitability, making us quasi-victims of our circumstances rather than full agents.

I think there’s value in thinking about how much of human history is happenstance and outside circumstances, but I also really appreciated Graeber and Wengrow’s pushback against that. They fight hard against teleology and for human agency, arguing that the present we live in wasn’t inevitable, and that humans aren’t locked into a particular path. They suggest that we’re unwilling to give our ancestors the benefit of the doubt in terms of political debate and true agency. In the 12th chapter, they particularly call out social scientists for being so eager to identify independent variables for human decisions (my words, not theirs) that we don’t leave enough room for deliberation and free choice.

In recent years, I’ve experienced a growing skepticism of positivist research in the social sciences for similar reasons: Causal relationships feel to me like they’re ultimately about control, even when the research is clearly well intentioned. Similarly, I’ve needed some hope in the past few years that change is possible, and while the authors don’t explicitly tackle this question, it feels implicit in their conclusions: If the present wasn’t inevitable, the future is open to negotiation.

So, yeah, maybe my take on this book is biased. I’m willing to own up to that. At the same time, though, one of the things I most appreciate about the book is the way it calls into question just how little we know about the world and just how biased we all are. Science is great, but on the other side of accepting empiricism, there’s a need for caution… and some deeper underlying philosophy.

• The Dawn of Everything
• David Graeber and David Wengrow
• Yuval Noah Harari
• Sapiens
• David Graeber
• David Wengrow
• history
• social science
• positivism
• epistemological humility
• causal relationships
• research paradigms
• philosophy
• anarchism
• bias