The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber and David Wengrow's revisionist history of human social organization — arguing that prehistory was far more politically diverse than the Rousseau-to-Hobbes spectrum suggests.

The challenge to social evolution teleology: Graeber and Wengrow attack the assumption (shared by Rousseau, Pinker, Diamond, and Harari from different directions) that human societies inevitably pass through stages from simple equality to complex hierarchy. Using Poverty Point, Çatalhöyük, Mohenjo-daro, and other archaeological evidence, they argue that large, complex societies existed without hierarchy; that seasonal and contextual shifts between political forms were common; and that the question 'when did inequality originate?' assumes an inevitability that the evidence doesn't support. Among the most intellectually ambitious social science books of the decade.