The Dawn of Everything: Social Science with a Mission

Abstract

The Dawn of Everything is a general-audience social science book with a mission. In a nutshell, the book argues against evolutionary accounts that view societal development as a trade-off involving increased social complexity, increased social control, and the loss of egalitarian ideals. Since Rousseau’s Social Contract, Graeber and Wengrow argue, Western thought has followed a ‘myth’ which sees inequality and coercion as necessary byproducts of the transition to higher states of civilisation. Laying out a broad array of recent archaeological and classic anthropological evidence, the authors argue that unilineal accounts of world history ignore too much evidence to the contrary to be convincing.