The Dawn of Everything The Dawn of Everything

The Dawn of Everything

    • 4.2 • 108 Ratings
    • $32.99

    • $32.99

Publisher Description

"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

GENRE
Nonfiction
NARRATOR
MW
Mark Williams
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
24:13
hr min
RELEASED
2021
November 9
PUBLISHER
Macmillan Audio
SIZE
1.5
GB

Customer Reviews

pablo.paz ,

Don’t judge a book by its cover

By its cover, I thought this book would be another general history with revisionist point of view. I also thought it would be poorly written. I was wrong.
In fact, it’s a quite interesting ethnology of the human race.
The authors challenge, many traditional ways of understanding the development of societies, civilization, and progress. I learned a lot, and I already know a lot of anthropology! It’s not an exciting book; although it’s not dreadfully academic, I recommend this book for understanding all of us humans.

PolloGis ,

Go slowly

Read/listen, reflect, consider, repeat.

On my 2nd listen now.

superexasperated ,

Revolutionary

Superb and frankly revolutionary, the world has been waiting a long time for this book. The downside is I now can’t go back and read any standard historical work because it all just seems so much mythology, ideology and nonsense.

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