The Dawn of Everything

A New History of Humanity

De: David Graeber, David Wengrow

Narrado por: Mark Williams

"An all-encompassing treatise on modern civilization, offering bold revisions to canonical understandings in sociology, anthropology, archaeology and political philosophy that led to where we are today."—The New York Times

A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

©2021 David Graeber and David Wengrow (P)2021 Macmillan Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

Short-listed, Orwell Prize, 2022

Long-listed, Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year, 2021

Long-listed, NPR Best Book of the Year, 2021

Long-listed, Amazon.com Best Books of the Year, 2021

Rest In Peace David, No one has changed my view of history more times.

It’s really hard to feel optimistic about the choices ahead of us, but this powerful ode to human imagination across history across geography and across technological advance has my mind bursting at the seams imagining all the ways to live together we’ve tried and all the ways beautiful we haven’t yet had the chance to

Essential read for everyone but anthropologists

A lot of this information is well known amongst professional anthropologists and academics, and as a student, I was familiar with many of the concepts that were highlighted throughout. However, as an inexperienced anthropologist this book did solidify these ideas and presented them in a way that allowed me to see the world through a wider lens. So I highly recommend it to students. However, the audience this book was written for was certainly everyone but professional anthropologists. Before I became a student, everyone around me, myself included, lamented the sociopolitical position, a kind of slavery, that we seemed to be trapped in. But this book does an excellent job at highlighting the alternative ways that we can structure society and suggests possible reasons we came to find ourselves in this situation to begin with. It’s true that the authors hand picked information and left out certain details, but in order to display their argument in a concise way, this was necessary. Many scholars will argue and say that Wengrow and Graeber (RIP) were biased and choosy, but they have to remember that scholars aren’t their audience, and the purpose of the book is to show that we can structure our society in other ways (with word limits, which scholars should be familiar with). The authors centered their research around our three freedoms which, without, we risk becoming a kind of slave. They suggest that by reclaiming the freedoms we may have lost, we can regain control of our lives and find peace within society. But to do this would essentially require restructuring our society, whether from the top down or bottom up, or in other words by creating laws that enable this freedom or via a kind of revolution. They don’t make any suggestions about how this should happen, but I can imagine that it won’t be easy and won’t happen overnight. I personally think it’s necessary, but discourage any form of violence this change could inspire. Finally, I’d just like to congratulate them on finishing a complex and important research project that’s likely puzzled non-anthropologists and non-social scientists everywhere ever since our democratic “Western” society began mutating back into an aristocracy via rampant capitalism and colonialism.

A feast for the intellect and the imagination

Fantastic. Thought-provoking. The authors share fresh perspectives, encouraging us to challenge our grand narratives.

Eye opening

A fresh perspective on the history of civilization and political thought for a lay audience.

Must Read

This work is foundational to every aspect of understanding humanity in the present state. I’m glad to see this work being picked up in university circles. The extent of this research, the impact it has and will continue to have on our collective knowledge and the ease with which it is at hand grounds this book as the beginning of a new canon which will define the lens through which we view predecessors and ourselves. My only hope is that current and future generations will pick up where Graeber and Wengrow have left off to more fully color in our history so that we can learn to live in a more truthful, just world and not one built around the axis of power.