early cities followed the opposite trajectory, starting withneighbourhood councils and popular assemblies and ending up being ruledby warlike dynasts, who then had to maintain an uneasy coexistence witholder institutions of urban governance. Something along these lines tookplace in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, after the Uruk period: here again theconvergence between systems of violence and systems of care seemscritical

At the very least,these were simply the logical outcome of our first freedom: to move awayfrom one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued,in some distant place. At most they were examples of ‘amphictyony’, inwhich some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care andmaintenance of sacred places. It seems that Marcel Mauss had a point whenhe argued that we should reserve the term ‘civilization’ for great hospitalityzones such as these.

Domus, the Latin word for ‘household’, in turn gives us not only ‘domestic’and ‘domesticated’ but dominium, which was the technical term for theemperor’s sovereignty as well as a citizen’s power over private property

Whilethey spent their public lives making sober judgments as magistrates, theylived their private lives in households where they not only had near-totalauthority over their wives, children and other dependants, but also had alltheir needs taken care of by dozens, perhaps hundreds of slaves

The three basic freedoms have gradually receded, tothe point where a majority of people living today can barely comprehendwhat it might be like to live in a social order based on them

We have made the case that private property firstappears as a concept in sacred contexts, as do police functions and powersof command, along with (in later times) a whole panoply of formaldemocratic procedures, like election and sortition, which were eventuallydeployed to limit such powers

ll this might seem like an oddly clumsy projection of Freudian theory,but for one thing. The text is from 1649. It was written by a certain FatherRagueneau in a Jesuit Relation, precisely 250 years before the appearanceof the first edition of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), an eventwhich, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, is widely seen as one of thefounding events of twentieth-century thought.

One problem with evolutionism is that it takes ways of life that developedin symbiotic relation with each other and reorganizes them into separatestages of human history

Empires wereexceptional and short-lived, and even the most powerful – Roman, Han,Ming, Inca – could not prevent large-scale movements of people into andout of their spheres of control.

from about 3000 BC to AD 1600 was a fairlymiserable one for the bulk of the world’s farmers, it was a Golden Age forthe barbarians, who reaped all the advantages of their proximity to dynasticstates and empires

he grain-based kingdomswere fragile, always prone to collapse under the weight of over-population,ecological devastation and the kind of endemic diseases that always seemedto result when too many humans, domesticated animals and parasitesaccumulated in one place

Cereal agriculture did notcause the rise of extractive states, but it was certainly predisposed to theirfiscal requirements

Once again, was it not just a matter oftime before one of those kingdoms (or, as it turned out, a small collection ofthem) came up with a successful formula for world conquest – just the rightcombination of guns, germs and steel – and imposed its system oneverybody else

thinkers who do seek to knit together the findings of specialists, to describethe course of human history on a grand scale, haven’t entirely got past thebiblical notion of the Garden of Eden, the Fall and subsequent inevitabilityof domination

by the eighteenth century, the indigenous critique – and the deep questionsit posed about money, faith, hereditary power, women’s rights and personalfreedoms – was having an enormous influence on leading figures of theFrench Enlightenment, but also resulted in a backlash among Europeanthinkers which produced an evolutionary framework for human history thatremains broadly intact today.

It can mean a game of honour or chance gone terriblywrong, or the incorrigible growth of a particular ritual for feeding the dead;it can mean industrial slaughter, the appropriation by men of femaleknowledge, or governance by a college of priestesses.

What we do know is that, in the final centuries of the Classicperiod, women attain a new visibility in sculpture and inscription, appearingnot just as consorts, princesses and queen mothers but also as powerfulrulers and spirit mediums in their own right. We also know that at somepoint in the ninth century the Classic Maya political system came apart, andmost of the great cities were abandoned

As the Zapatistas also show, itwas in these territories, where no major state or empire had existed forcenturies, that women came most prominently to the fore in anti-colonialstruggles, both as organizers of armed resistance and as defenders ofindigenous tradition

At the time of theinitial Spanish incursion, the region was divided into what seemed to thesettlers an endless succession of tiny principalities, townships, villages andseasonal hamlets.

would like to suggest that these three principles – call them control ofviolence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also thethree possible bases of social power

the French term corvée. This refers to obligatory labouron civic projects exacted from free citizens on a seasonal basis,

Biodiversity – not bio-power – was the initial key to the growth ofNeolithic food production

The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of humansocieties to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fullybecoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too muchof one’s existence to the logistical rigours of agriculture; and retain a foodweb sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter oflife and death.

Charles Darwin wrote an entire book about humans being social creatures. He wrote that any Hobbesian human would be an “unnatural monster.”

Unfortunately, the ideas most economists use have been too influenced by “methodological individualism,” rather than the more scientifically supported view of us as a super-social, super-cooperative, intensely interdependent species. Often, this economics-style individualism is of the Thomas Hobbes variety, which paints humans in “a state of nature,” waging a “war of all against all.”

The Dawn of Everything, Part 2 by Miriam Ronzoni

Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation– but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appearto have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness,and as laboratories of social possibility

really important about such festivals is that they kept the oldspark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imaginethat other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole

Somehave gone so far as to argue that what we call ‘social structure’ only reallyexists during rituals: think here of families that only exist as a physicalgroup during marriages and funerals, during which times questions of rankand priority have to be worked out

there is still themidwinter ‘holiday season’ in which values and forms of organization do,to a limited degree, reverse themselves

The only consistentphenomenon is the very fact of alteration, and the consequent awareness ofdifferent social possibilities.

the only way state-likeauthority could possibly have emerged was from religious visionaries ofone sort or anothe

They had self-consciously organized in such a way that the forms ofarbitrary power and domination we associate with ‘advanced politicalsystems’ could never possibly emerge

Pierre Clastreswas quite right when he proposed that, rather than being less politicallyself-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies mightactually have been considerably more so

With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside theboundaries of any given structure and reflect; to both make and unmake thepolitical worlds we live in

Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos more recent efforts at classifyinghunter-gatherers into either ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ types, since what havebeen identified as the diagnostic features of ‘complexity’ – territoriality,social ranks, material wealth or competitive display – appear during certainseasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact samepopulation.

: that societiesmust necessarily progress through a series of evolutionary stages to beginwith.

Not only did they dismantle all means of exercisingcoercive authority the moment the ritual season was over, they were alsocareful to rotate which clan or warrior clubs got to wield it: anyone holdingsovereignty one year would be subject to the authority of others in thenext.

in the first half of the twentieth century, it was commonknowledge that societies doing a great deal of hunting, herding or foragingwere often arranged in such a ‘double morphology’

he peoples ofBritain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continentalEurope, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it:abandoning the cultivation of cereals and returning, from around 3300 BC,to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food.

the overall pattern of seasonal congregation for festive labourseems well established

In general, Palaeolithic people wereclearly much more at home with human body parts than we are

The kind of political self-consciousnesswhich seemed so self-evident in Nambikwara chiefs, let alone the wildimprovisation expected of Nuer prophets, had no place in the revisedframework of human social evolution

ramed hunter-gatherer studies in terms of a new disciplinewhich its attendees proposed to call ‘behavioural ecology’, starting withrigorously quantified studies of African savannah and rainforest groups

But in doing so theywere effectively moving back and forth, each year, between whatevolutionary anthropologists (in the tradition of Turgot) insist on thinking

what really struck him about the ‘primitive’ societies he wasmost familiar with was their tolerance of eccentricity

everyone at least pays lipservice to the psychic unity of mankind

But by the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, many in Europe and America had reached the point ofarguing that someone like Kandiaronk could never have really existed in thefirst place. ‘Primitive’ folk, they argued, were not only incapable of politicalself-consciousness, they were not even capable of fully conscious thoughton the individual level – or at least conscious thought worthy of the name.

Western philosophical tradition has taken a ratherunusual direction over the last few centuries. Around the same time as itabandoned dialogue as its typical mode of writing, it also began imaginingthe isolated, rational, self-conscious individual not as a rare achievement,something typically accomplished – if at all – after literally years of livingisolated in a cave or monastic cell, or on top of a pillar in a desertsomewhere, but as the normal default state of human beings anywhere

Ancient philosophers tended to be keenly aware of all this: that’swhy, whether they were in China, India or Greece, they tended to write theirbooks in the form of dialogues.

Philosophers tend to define human consciousness in termsof self-awareness; neuroscientists, on the other hand, tell us we spend theoverwhelming majority of our time effectively on autopilot, working outhabitual forms of behaviour without any sort of conscious reflection

sapient paradox

Evidence of institutional inequality in Ice Age societies, whether grandburials or monumental buildings, is sporadic.

two phenomena – hierarchy and the measure of time – wereclosely interwoven.

our genetic nature is Hobbesian, but our political history is pretty muchexactly as described by Rousseau.

If the very essence of our humanity consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore capable of embracing a wide rangeof social arrangements, would that not mean human beings should actuallyhave explored a wide range of social arrangements over the greater part ofour history?

actuarial intelligence’. That’s to say, they understand whattheir society might look like if they did things differently: if, for instance,skilled hunters were not systematically belittled, or if elephant meat was notportioned out to the group by someone chosen at random (as opposed to theperson who actually killed the beast). This, he concludes, is the essence ofpolitics:

what makessocieties distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decisionnot to act that way

thedensity of human interactions seems to have radically increased, especially

In the 1980s and 1990s it was widely assumed that something profoundhappened, some kind of sudden creative efflorescence, around 45,000 yearsago, variously referred to in the literature as the ‘Upper PalaeolithicRevolution’ or even the ‘Human Revolution

complexsymbolic human behaviour, or simply ‘culture’. Currently, it dates back nomore than 100,000 years

Athenian intellectuals at thetime, who were mostly of aristocratic background, tended to consider thewhole arrangement a tawdry business, and most of them much preferred thegovernment of Sparta

As a result, such distanttimes can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collectivefantasies.

This uniformity is not, inevolutionary terms, particularly old. Its genetic basis was establishedaround half a million years ago, but it is almost certainly misguided to think

the people ofprehistoric times had very specific ideas about what was important in theirsocieties; that these varied considerably; and that describing such societiesas uniformly ‘egalitarian’ tells us almost nothing about them

whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make ushuman in the first place

The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not ourequal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production),much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity tocontribute to decisions about how to live together.

the best we can hope for are more sophisticated internal and externalcontrols on our supposedly innate drive towards accumulation and self-aggrandizement.

We arenonetheless determined to write prehistory as if it consisted of people onewould have been able to talk to, when they were still alive

we have learned it’s to ouradvantage to prioritize our long-term interests over our short-term instincts

It held that, humans being the selfishcreatures they are, life in an original State of Nature was in no senseinnocent; it must instead have been ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’– basically, a state of war, with everybody fighting against everybody else.

This post is mainly about the book’s attempt to dismantle the myth of “agriculture as the source of social inequality.” The next post will be about Graeber’s and Wengrow’s startling claim that European Enlightenment can be seen, to a large extent, as the result of a conversation with Indigenous, non-western intellectuals and societies – indeed, as inspired by them.

what they see as our three basic freedoms: the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements?

What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package that’s persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics).

The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).