By David Graeber and David Wengrow (Penguin, 2021).

Review by Robert M. Ellis

This extraordinary new book is an extended implicit application of the Middle Way, as well as a highly innovative mould-breaking theory of history. Its authors (one now deceased) are an archaeologist and an anthropologist respectively, who were struck by the increasing misfit between the gathering evidence of complexity in the early history of human beings, and the dogmatic assumptions through which it was being routinely interpreted. One of those dogmas is Hobbesian – that life for earlier humans before the state evolved, was ‘nasty, brutish and short’, and the other, opposed set of assumptions stems from Rousseau – that early humans were noble savages and we have declined into a sick civilization. The thing I found most striking and inspiring about this book straight away, then, is that engages in the two phase critique of the Middle Way rather than a reactive flip, following the complexity of the evidence and seeking new ways of interpreting it that do it justice. The result, too, is an inspiring theory that provides a source of hope – that is, that the historical evidence shows that humans do not inevitably have to adopt top-down ways of thinking and living their lives, but are clearly capable of living together in ways that are much more open, consultative, democratic, and ‘free’ in the concrete ways that actually matter.

At the same time as putting forward this inspiring and ground-breaking historical theory, this book synthesises an impressively wide range of evidence from all of early world history: including evidence of Paleolithic life from around the globe, and discussions particularly of Sumeria, Egypt, and the Pre-Columbian Americas. Amongst the epiphanies for me regarding the Americas were that there were non-Aztec Republics in Mesoamerica, that the Native American groups around the Great Lakes had very sophisticated ways of reaching decisions through discussions (giving no real power to chiefs), and that the Native American groups in the north-west and in what is now California had totally contrasting social systems that constantly played off in reaction to each other: self-indulgent slave-holders versus ascetic egalitarians.

Graeber and Wengrow argue, with constant reference to very varied evidence, that the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ actually took 300 years, and had nothing inevitable about it, being sometimes deliberately ignored or reversed. They also argue that when agriculture did start to support cities, this did not immediately mean that they had to be organized in a top-down authoritarian fashion. Irrigation, for instance, was often managed co-operatively, and the evidence seems to be that many early cities were organized by citizens’ councils rather than by kings. When the harsh rule of kings did occur later, it was often initially developed elsewhere, in the highlands, rather than the cereal-cultivating river valleys. Many of the distinctive characteristics of particular cultures, including the technologies, forms of rule, and ways of life they adopted, were not due to an inevitable ascent on an evolutionary ladder towards the modern world, but rather in a ‘schismogenetic’ response to neighbouring groups that they wanted to differentiate themselves from.

I finished this book generally slightly more sympathetic to two kinds of views that I have previously considered naive: one being anarchism, in the sense of the conviction that humans could manage without the ‘state’ as we currently understand it, and the other being the view that Native North American groups have a superior insight (compared to cultures originating in Europe) as to how to live in harmony with their environment. What made the difference is simply the amount of evidence that challenged my previous assumptions. Whatever the practical difficulties of recapturing that situation, it seems clear that people in the past have lived effectively without the current authority and bureaucratic power that we currently associated with the ‘state’. The assumption that we always had to have the state in this form began to seem to me an unnecessarily top-down assumption – the application of a dogma that didn’t actually fit the evidence. Similarly, with the view of Native Americans that I’d previously regarded as an idealization, I can now see that there is actually a lot of good evidence that supports the view that they lived (not perfectly, but) in better harmony with their environment than we have managed (at least in the eastern and central parts of North America). This is particularly, it seems, because they developed a state-like urban civilization at Cahokia and associated sites, but then consciously abandoned it, leaving behind river-valley farming and consciously limiting their numbers to those that could be supported by hunting, gathering, and a little small-scale gardening.

Sacred cows of history are systematically slaughtered throughout this book. You may reconsider your view, not only of all the issues I have already mentioned, but of the origins of farming, the role of women, the origins of ideologies of liberation in the West (which seem to owe a lot to the critique offered by Native Americans), the pivotal role of ‘civilizations’, and the origins of kingship. If there’s an assumption about human history you don’t yet realize you have, this book will make you re-examine it. Personally, I’ve found it immensely valuable to provide a new perspective on aspects of the book I’m currently writing, which is called ‘A Systemic History of the Middle Way’, and incorporates cultural history along with biology and developmental psychology. The Middle Way is a response to absolutization, and one can hardly trace the history of one in any sense without the other. What this book has helped me to do most is to make a clear case that there is no inevitability about absolutization: one can see this in its social expression as power hierarchies as well as in the development of human psychologies. We did not adopt power hierarchies with their attendant dogmas as a matter of course with agriculture and urbanization, any more than we must inevitably adopt metaphysics as a necessary set of assumptions in our thinking. It may seem just as unthinkable to be without either – but all you have to do is to consider the evidence, and open your mind to new possible interpretations of it.

We are not locked into the power-relationships that have brought us the current world crises, any more than we are necessarily locked into the absolute beliefs that are used to justify those power relationships. There are always grounds for hope, because we can always start to adopt the Middle Way of judgement in response to whatever particular set of conditions start to confront us, however many previous mistakes we have made. Now I see further grounds for hope, too, after reading this book: in the past, people have thought and acted in all sorts of ways that we now may consider unthinkable, yet for those people they were normal. We should never limit our understanding of what is possible.