Graeber – Lesson 5: The Dawn of Everything and what the deep past tells us about human freedom
Kia ora,
This lesson we come to the last and in some ways the most ambitious book Graeber wrote — The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, co-authored with archaeologist David Wengrow and published in 2021, just over a year after Graeber’s death.
It is a big book in every sense. It covers tens of thousands of years of human history. It draws on decades of new archaeological and anthropological evidence. And its argument is simple but radical: almost everything we think we know about the deep past — about where inequality came from, about whether hierarchy is natural, about the range of social arrangements humans are capable of — is wrong.
The stories we tell ourselves about the past
Graeber and Wengrow begin with a puzzle. Why do we believe that social inequality is inevitable? The most common answer, across both the political left and right, goes something like this: for most of human history, people lived in small, relatively egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Then came agriculture. Agriculture created surplus. Surplus created property. Property created hierarchy. And hierarchy — kings, classes, states, capitalism — followed naturally and inevitably.
This story appears in Rousseau. It appears in mainstream social science. It appears in popular books about human nature. It is so widely shared that it feels less like an argument than a fact.
Graeber and Wengrow argue it is a myth — and a politically dangerous one, because it makes hierarchy seem like the inevitable product of complexity, and therefore beyond challenge.
What the evidence actually shows
The archaeological evidence accumulated over the past few decades paints a completely different picture. What it shows is that early human societies were astonishingly diverse. Some were egalitarian. Some had hierarchy of a kind, but only seasonally — chiefs and ceremonies in winter, dispersed and relatively flat organisation in summer. Some built large cities with no evidence of palaces, kings, or concentrated wealth. Some had slavery. Some clearly did not.
The key point is this: early humans were not locked into a single social form determined by their technology or their mode of subsistence. They experimented. They chose. They debated. They built radically different kinds of society, sometimes across distances of a few hundred kilometres.
Graeber and Wengrow give particular attention to what they call the indigenous critique — the documented encounters between European colonists and indigenous North American thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These encounters produced serious, sustained critiques of European society by indigenous intellectuals. Figures like the Wendat leader Kandiaronk argued, with documented sophistication, that European society was characterised by a kind of poverty of freedom: people were materially dependent in ways that made them servile, unable to simply leave arrangements they found unjust.
Graeber and Wengrow argue that the European Enlightenment — including its concepts of freedom, equality, and democracy — was significantly shaped by these encounters. The ideas did not flow only westward.
The political stakes
The argument of The Dawn of Everything is not nostalgic. Graeber and Wengrow are not saying we should return to some prior state. They are saying something more important: the range of social possibilities available to humans is vastly wider than we currently imagine.
If hierarchy, states, and concentrated wealth are not inevitable consequences of agriculture and complexity, then they are choices — or rather, the results of specific historical processes that imposed them, often through violence. Which means they can be undone. Which means other arrangements are possible.
This is what the book calls the dawn of everything: not a single origin point from which all subsequent history necessarily followed, but an ongoing, unfinished human project of experimenting with how to live together.
What this means for Aotearoa
For readers in Aotearoa, this framework has particular resonance. Te ao Māori — the Māori world — contains within it a rich tradition of thinking about collective organisation, about the relationship between people and land, about the obligations that bind communities together. These are not museum pieces. They are living frameworks that have survived colonisation and are being actively renewed.
The Dawn of Everything offers an intellectual context for taking these traditions seriously not just as cultural heritage, but as genuine political knowledge. As evidence that the forms of organisation that colonialism sought to destroy were real and functional — and that their principles have not disappeared.
It also invites us to ask: what would Aotearoa look like if it drew more fully on the political wisdom of the people who have lived here longest?
Questions for you
Does it change how you think about the present if you believe that hierarchy and inequality are the results of specific historical choices rather than inevitable consequences of complexity?
What aspects of Māori political and social organisation do you think offer the most important resources for thinking about a different kind of future?
What does it mean to say that another world is possible, when you are living inside this one?
Reply or comment.
Next up: Lesson 6 – Synthesis: what Graeber’s whole body of work means for how we think and act in Aotearoa today.
In solidarity,
The Kiwi Dialect