We are not naturally condemned to live under the circumstances we are currently forced to endure. A critical look at the history we are usually told reveals just how diverse societies were — and still could develop today.
Most historians – and, following in their footsteps, most authors, journalists, politicians and people in general – believe that at the dawn of human history there were just a few small bands of hunter-gatherers who roamed Africa and later other continents, living freely and happily, the kind of ‘noble savages’. Then humans began to switch to agriculture and, as a result, had to establish stable societies characterised by an increasing division of labour, leadership by specific individuals and growing social differentiation. As towns grew, states emerged and the population increased, societies inevitably became more stratified and governed from above. That is why the world is the way it is today – with so many people on the planet and all the comforts that many of them enjoy, how could one even imagine societies organised any differently?
A simple but fundamentally flawed narrative, told retrospectively from the perspective of its present-day endpoint in order to justify the status quo.
In their book, David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrate, on the basis of a meticulous analysis of archaeological and anthropological findings, that the development of societies followed a meandering path between hunting-gathering and agriculture; that cities emerged long before the famous, but non-existent ‘agrarian revolution’, that traces of very different forms of society can be found – egalitarian and dictatorial, as well as everything in between, and so on.
In short: we are not naturally condemned to live under the circumstances we are currently forced to endure. We can still develop more just and more peaceful societies, the authors conclude.
David Graeber and David Wengrow. ’The Dawn of Everything’. Penguin Books, 2022.
Deutsch: «Anfänge. Eine neue Geschichte der Menschheit». Klett Cotta, 2022.
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