The Indigenous Critique & the Myth of Progress (Ch. 2): The Dawn of Everything

“This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast. There is not a single chapter that does not (playfully) disrupt well-seated intellectual beliefs. It is deep, effortlessly iconoclastic, factually rigorous, and pleasurable to read.” — NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, author of The Black Swan

Renowned activist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with professor of comparative archaeology David Wengrow to deliver a trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social 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 only be achieved by sacrificing those original freedoms, or alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. Graeber and 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...

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.

Biweekly book discussion group, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) by the anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow. Available in multiple formats and languages.

Please read Chapter Two, book pages 27-77, in advance.

You are very welcome to attend if you didn’t do the reading; discussion preference will be given to those who did.

You can find the book here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YXXaVEwZ-cIc37Y0Z9ujEcK3_X2Jpmnh/view?usp=sharing

Discussion of all 50 pages of this chapter. The chapter subheads are in quotation marks below.

Part I of today’s meeting (pp. 27-44): “In which we show how critiques of
Eurocentrism can backfire, and end up turning aboriginal thinkers into ‘sock-puppets’ — In which we consider what the inhabitants of New France made of their European invaders, especially in matters of generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.”

Part II of today’s meeting (pp. 44-77): “In which we show how Europeans learned from (Native) Americans about the connection between reasoned debate, personal freedoms and the refusal of arbitrary power — In which we introduce the Wendat philosopher-statesman Kandiaronk, and explain how his views on human nature and
society took on new life in the salons of Enlightenment Europe (including an aside on the concept of ‘schismogenesis’) — In which we explain the demiurgic powers of A.R.J. Turgot, and how he turned the Indigenous critique of European civilization on its head, laying the basis for most modern views of social evolution (or: How an argument about ‘freedom’ became one about ‘equality’) — How Jean-Jacques Rousseau, having won one prestigious essay competition, then lost another (coming in over the permitted word length), but finally went on to conquer the whole of human history — In which we consider relationships between the Indigenous critique, the myth of progress, and the birth of the left — Beyond the ‘myth of the stupid savage’ (why all these things matter so much for our progress in this book).”

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