When I was in grad school, I was pretty centrist: more liberal than most of the students from BYU (where I’d just finished my bachelor’s) but more conservative than most of the students at MSU. I had an odd experience one day when a fellow student far, FAR to the left from where I was teasingly chided me for a Facebook post I’d made defending Common Core from one of my BYU friends who was convinced it was a communist plot. This really confused me, since it had never occurred to me that one could critique Common Core from the left.

In some ways, this was a similar experience. I’ve read Graeber enough to know that he’s critical of bureaucracy, but it’s very strange to me to read a critique of bureacracy from the left—especially when the far right is currently using a critique of bureaucracy to gut the federal government.

That’s not why I’m ultimately a bit critical of this book, though. I’m interested in Graeber’s critique, but there are other things that don’t sit right. I’ve read a fair amount of Graeber at this point, and while I think there are lots of gems in his writing, I have trouble following the arguments he’s making that result in those gems, and I’m always worried that I’m agreeing with conclusions that I don’t understand the basis of.

In his other books, though, I feel like the evidence at least feels compelling enough for me to set aside those worries. This book veers more into the scholar’s or philosopher’s making bold claims without taking the time to get me on board with those claims, and that annoys me. There are some observations in the book that really land with me, but I don’t always follow the steps that got us there.

I’m particularly torn about Graeber’s engagement with pop culture. It’s clear that he knows enough about D&D or Batman to present some interesting readings of them, but at the risk of falling into nerdy gatekeeping, sometimes the details just feel a bit off or the conclusions feel a bit stretched.

There’s good stuff in here, but I think this book is the scapegoat of some of the running concerns I have when I read Graeber. I’m planning to reread The Dawn of Everything soon, though, so it’s not as if I’m giving up on him.

• The Utopia of Rules
• David Graeber
• The Dawn of Everything
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years
• Batman
• Dungeons and Dragons
• anarchism
• Common Core State Standards