The Dawn of Everything

The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber, David Wengrow · 2022

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1. Three elementary sources of social domination

   Instead of treating 'the State' as a single entity with one origin, the authors break domination into three separable sources: control over violence (sovereignty), control over information (bureaucracy), and charismatic competition (politics). Early centralised societies such as the Olmec and Chavín de Huántar can be read as having developed one or two of these without the others. The authors argue that modern states combine all three in a way that owes more to colonial violence than to a steady social evolution.

2. The Indigenous critique shaped Enlightenment thought

   The authors argue that the Enlightenment question of the 'origins of inequality' grew partly out of European contact with Indigenous North Americans, who criticised European hierarchy, punitive law, and profit-seeking. They use the Wendat leader Kondiaronk, as presented in Baron Lahontan's best-selling writings, as their main illustration. They further argue that the stage-based narrative of hunter to farmer to commercial society developed partly as a way to silence this critique by recasting Indigenous freedoms as primitive.

3. Seasonal switching between political regimes

   The authors document societies that changed their political organisation across the year, moving between authoritarian arrangements in some seasons and looser, communal ones in others. They take this as evidence that early humans could consciously try out different social orders, and were not locked into a single evolutionary 'stage'.

4. Schismogenesis: defining yourself against neighbours

   Cultural schismogenesis is the process by which neighbouring societies form their identities by deliberately differing from each other. The authors use it to explain why slaveholding foragers on the Northwest Coast lived next to Californian foragers who rejected slavery. On this reading, those differences came from self-conscious political choices, not from ecology or mode of production.

5. Agriculture spread slowly, without a revolution

   The authors argue there was no single Agricultural Revolution. Farming instead took hold over thousands of years on each continent, often alongside foraging, sometimes abandoned on purpose, and in some cases, such as prehistoric Europe, ending in demographic collapse. They conclude that ecological flexibility and sustained biodiversity were key to the cases where early agriculture succeeded and spread.

6. Large cities did not automatically produce rulers

   Using cases from Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Ukraine, China, and Mesoamerica, the authors argue that urban scale did not mechanically lead to ruling elites, though they accept that some cities were stratified from the beginning. They point to early cities with little sign of temples, palaces, or central administration. They also point to Teotihuacan, which began as a hierarchical settlement but shifted towards providing high-quality housing for most residents.

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