A New Theory of History — And Prehistory — And Posthistory

Revolutionizing how the past prepares us for the future

David Graeber, the anarchist anthropologist many know from coining the term “bullshit job” back in 2013, died in 2020. After a book by him and archaeologist David Wengrow was published in 2021, though — The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humankind — he’s had a posthumous spotlight put upon him. The book is being lauded left and right, and for good reason, but we’re not here for a book review. Essentially, Graeber’s most important point is that the worldwide domination of centralized hierarchies that we see today was not at all inevitable. Complex non-hierarchical and non-agricultural societies competed with and resisted the encroachment of their power-driven neighbors for millennia. Humans have experimented with countless radical socio-political models across history. It is only by misfortune that we find ourselves today stuck with, more or less, just one.

His conclusions present a problem, though. If it isn’t actually natural or necessary for the world to be organized under essentially one form of social structure, then why does the world look that way today? Why did the multiplicity of social models disappear? Did the “survival of the fittest” simply lead humanity into its greatest and most efficient system yet? Or is something else at play?

The obvious conclusion that power-driven states won the world by virtue of their drive for power seems easy enough, but it ignores two points. Firstly, the…