Toward a Theory of Myth Critique: Ideology, Learned Ignorance, and the Conditions of Imaginative Success

Abstract

Sweeping accounts of the history of the human species—from Rousseau (1997 [1755]) to Toynbee (1934–1961) to Diamond (1997) to Harari (2014)—are no novelty in popular culture, just as they are no strangers to controversy. But the debate that ensued around David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), perhaps the most significant recent addition to this genre, was different. One especially striking instance of its peculiar reception unfolded in the pages of the New York Review of Books letters section between Wengrow and the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who had written a lengthy review.

Appiah was clearly taken with Graeber and Wengrow's project. Expressing admiration for its vision of freedom and political possibility, he rounded off his review with the verdict that, “whatever its empirical shortcomings, the book must be counted an imaginative success” (Appiah 2021). But this conclusion also came, almost like an afterthought, at the heels of a detailed report on those very empirical shortcomings, which took up the greater part of his review. In their book, Graeber and Wengrow had positioned themselves as debunkers of a pervasive “myth” about human history: a Rousseauian narrative about the birth of political society from out of an original, prepolitical state, whereby the privatization of property and domination by centralized governments were the necessary price humans had to pay for the complexity of civilization. But among the preponderance of archaeological counterexamples the authors marshaled as a corrective to this myth, not a single one, Appiah judged, held up to strict scrutiny. “Two half-truths, alas, do not make a truth,” he concluded, “and neither do a thousand” (Appiah 2021).

If Appiah had meant to praise the book as an imaginative success, this certainly got lost in the ensuing conversation, which quickly hardened into a debate over facts. In a fiery response, Wengrow defended their empirical foundations, accusing Appiah of being too beholden to the old myth to face the archaeological evidence challenging it. Appiah responded, for his part, by once again highlighting the ambiguities surrounding the evidence, and reaffirming his regard for the authors’ imaginative vision (Wengrow and Appiah 2022).

In this paper, we suggest something crucial is at stake in the crossfire of this conversation. All the parties to the debate agree that disrupting our sense of what is possible in politics is valuable, and that social criticism to this end is ultimately aimed at bringing about conceptual shifts in its audience that are, in essence, imaginative. Such shifts require their subjects to rework their attachments to tacit, subconscious values in the background of their worldviews. As such, successful social critique involves engaging the affective, aesthetic, and indeed mythic dimensions of our thinking that go beyond the realm of empirical facts. Appiah, who has elsewhere defended the value of philosophical fictions that are not factually true (Appiah 2017), would be the first to endorse this view. But despite this common ground, both Graeber and Wengrow's book and the ensuing discussion have clearly failed to escape appeals to and squabbles about facts—controversy over which could not help but drown out the imaginative ambition of the broader project. We believe that the tension between the book's aim to produce such an imaginative shift, on the one hand, and the difficulty it has encountered casting this endeavor in terms that are not strictly empirical, on the other, is indicative of a wider problem. Namely, the lack of a more robust theoretical framework for understanding the conditions under which the critique of myths—of the kind that Graeber and Wengrow claim to take up in the Dawn of Everything—can be counted as an imaginative success. What does it mean to critique the deep-seated stories in our inheritance that frame our ideas about who we are, where we come from, and where we are headed? Can we only criticize such stories from the perspective of facts—as factually correct or false—or from the perspective of values, as morally acceptable or problematic?

In what follows, we attempt to outline a different approach to critiquing myths, one that offers an alternative to both factual debunking and more traditional forms of ideology critique. The idea that the larger-scale stories we tell about our world and its possibilities have a complicated relationship to objective facts is well documented by scholars. Indeed, the crisis of representation was a cornerstone of the so-called “narrative” and “aesthetic turns” that spanned philosophy (e.g., Cavell 1976; Latour 1993; Rancière 1999; Taylor 1989), sociology (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Goffman 1981), psychology (Gergen 1999), literary studies (Scarry 1994), and history (White 2014 [1973]). The central concern at the heart of both these turns—a deep skepticism about whether knowledge can be based on secure and certain foundations—has become fraught in recent years, amidst growing anxieties over the political effectiveness of facts, and their uncertain relationship to cultural and social values now often designated as forms of ideology or “pseudo-science” (McIntyre 2019). These developments have also accompanied a renewed interest in the role of myths in politics, usually in a negative capacity, as practices of manipulation, gaslighting, or willful distortion and misrepresentation (Brennan 2016; Butter and Knight 2019; Cassam 2019).

At the same time, there has been a growing acknowledgment within a separate tradition for the need for social critics to return to certain varieties of ideology critique (Cooke n.d.; Hall 1986, Haslanger 2017; Lafont 2023). The push for a more properly “immanent” ideology critique, however, has simultaneously shined a light on the constraints posed by its commitment to the assumption that the self-reflexivity of social criticism demands a rational core (Winter, 2025). As such, ideology critique that fails to offer clear rational criteria for drawing distinctions between good and bad myths can risk devolving into an irrational relativism, ultimately fueling the pathologies of authoritarian and populist politics.

The crossroads at which the tradition of ideology critique stands today highlights the need for further critical reflection on the undertheorized cost it bears for its enduring commitment—however necessary—to the primacy of rationality in social criticism. For one, there is the question of whether such a commitment can be maintained without simultaneously conjuring a prejudice for certain forms of knowledge or privileging knowingness as an epistemic standpoint. These tendencies cannot help but reinforce the proverbial dichotomy between facts and values, encouraging us to idealize objectivity while relativizing subjectivity. To accept these ramifications, in turn, is also to compel us to reconsider the value and efficacy of social critique in polarized political landscapes, where too many individuals, unlikely to be swayed by the authority of facts, will experience such critique as overbearing, moralistic, or elitist.

Conversely, it remains unclear what kind of social criticism is made possible by the experiential and contextualist—and some might argue relativist—understandings of knowledge to come out of both the aesthetic and narrative turns. Scholars of myth, who have long defined myth precisely in terms of its resistance to fact and argument (Cassirer 1965, 29–31; Habermas 1987 [1981], 52–53; Sorel 1999, 29), have perennially acknowledged the need to rework the dominant narratives of our political imaginaries, pointing out, in turn, that such projects raise the additional difficulty of determining the criteria by which we might evaluate and critique myths (e.g., Bottici 2007, 16). If social critique is ultimately aimed at initiating the kinds of imaginative breakthroughs that free us from our accustomed stories about the world, neither correct facts nor the right ideology might be sufficient to the task.

Our own effort to think through this challenge is focused on developing an account of one kind of social critique aimed specifically at myths. For our purposes, we define myths as inherited and tacit narratives entrenched in our social world that address, without necessarily giving explanatory answers for, large-scale questions of existential significance for individuals and communities. Myth critique, in our view, requires the critic to creatively rework such myths while preserving a distinctly reflexive admission of ignorance on the questions they address.

We begin by returning to Graeber and Wengrow's conceptualization of Rousseau's conjectural history as a “myth.” Pointing to the ways they deploy both archaeological facts and normative value statements to challenge it, we suggest that Graeber and Wengrow undertake a form of ideology critique that is ultimately inappropriate to myth: a medium that has the distinct attitudinal function of structuring our relationship with opacity and that requires a corresponding form of critique that preserves this function. In the second part of our argument, we build on this insight to outline a framework for conceptualizing myth and what the critique of myths—of the kind that succeeds in a more imaginative overhaul of our deeply held concepts—looks like. Drawing from Karl Jaspers, Hans Blumenberg, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we argue that myth critique must (1) begin from a position of acknowledging the opacity of its subjects and, as a consequence, (2) is likely to take an aesthetic form. But to mitigate the special pitfalls that aesthetic modes of critique can exacerbate, it must, in addition, (3) cultivate an ethic of what we call learned ignorance. Finally, we develop our own account of this ethic by turning to the work of another anthropologist, Nastassja Martin, who shares Graeber and Wengrow's imaginative ambition, but who, unlike them, chooses to refrain from ideology critique. Martin's own unconventional approach to the critique of myths, we argue, can be productively brought in comparison with more rationalist proposals.

The word “myth” comes up often in David Graeber's larger oeuvre. In Debt, the “Myth of Barter” and “myth of primordial debt” appear as a pair of “origin stories” and “founding myth[s]” underpinning the history of modern economic thought (Graeber 2011, 75, 28), alongside the specter of “mythic communism” that has haunted understandings of the nature and feasibility of communistic forms of social organization (95). In Direct Action, Graeber borrows Michael Taussig's terminology of “mythological warfare” to make sense of both the imagery and narrative frames associated with the police in contemporary America and the media strategies of anarchist protesters, including the myth-making of radical puppeteers (Graeber 2009, 487).1 Likewise in The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow resort to the language of myth to refer to the stories we have inherited and come to take for granted about humanity's distant past, which also circumscribe our understanding of its future possibilities. Such narratives, for the authors, are myths in the sense that they are origin stories which reflect “our collective fantasies” and structure our current experience (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 78, 525). But they are also myths because the particular stories that happen to frame how we currently tend to imagine human prehistory have “almost nothing to do with the facts” made available by recent empirical scholarship (4–5). One myth in particular was the target of the book, and, to great controversy, the authors attributed its source to Rousseau's Second Discourse.

For Graeber and Wengrow, we still live in the shadow of a distinct origin myth: a linear narrative about the birth of civilization out of the State of Nature through a succession of discrete stages. In Rousseau's consequential rendering of this account, the final civilizing step that seals humanity's unfreedom is set in motion by the discovery of agriculture and metallurgy—a pair of events that lead to the institutionalization of private property and a centralized government dedicated to protecting it. Thus, for Rousseau (1997, 161), the “true founder of civil society” was “the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him.” The problem with this narrative, for Graeber and Wengrow, is not that Rousseau tied his account of humanity's moral decline to the advent of property—an insight they argue Rousseau owed to an indigenous critique of private property articulated by the Huron-Wendat chief Kandiaronk (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 48-59). Rather, Graeber and Wengrow fault Rousseau and the European reception of his conjectural history for failing to grasp Kandiaronk's point that society might be “based on anything else” other than property (66). By perpetuating the assumption that hierarchical domination organized around the privatization of property is hardwired in our nature, Rousseau's narrative helped trap the modern imagination in “such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves” (9). It is not so much our original harmony with nature that has been lost, but our sense of possibility.

Accordingly, the primary motivation behind Graeber and Wengrow's move to present Rousseau's conjectural history as a “myth” is to begin undoing the long-term damage they claim it has done to our political imagination. At stake in such myths was the very “imaginative” project that Appiah had lauded them for taking on: a conceptual shift that might restore “that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence” (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 502).

Graeber and Wengrow's approach to confronting the myth they identify, however, was a striking blend of empirical debunking and what essentially amounted to ideology critique. One prominent line of their attack was to expose the Rousseauian narrative as false, presenting an exhaustive catalog of archaeological evidence across their 450-page tome—from Göbekli Tepe, Stonehenge, Minoa, and Teotihuacan—suggesting the existence of large, complex early societies that were not dependent on domination by a centralized source of authority. But if Graeber and Wengrow attempted to counter a myth with a deluge of facts, their facts were also hardly ideologically neutral. Another strand of their effort to respond to their Rousseauian myth consistently emphasized that progress in the social sciences depends on practices of rupture and provocation that destabilize their own hegemonic assumptions. “Real change,” they argued, was the result of transformative moments of social breakthrough in which “the lines between myth and history, science and magic become blurred” (524). Social theory, on this view, was ultimately a “game of make-believe” for critics to actively intervene in (21), and Graeber and Wengrow accordingly saw their own task as the telling of a better story that can provide at once “a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history” (8). The authority wielded by the sheer volume of their empirical evidence operated within the performative framework of such a game, presenting a curious combination of rationalism and voluntarism that blurred the line between facts and values. The result was a form of critique predicated on a perspective external to the myth they set out to overturn—a privileged standpoint of knowingness from which they could judge the Rousseauvian account as “not only wrong, but quite needlessly dull” (21, see also 3).

In many ways, this quasi-rational ideology critique reflects a more general uncertainty in the political and theoretic discourse on the appropriate way to respond to myths. Theorists of myth have repeatedly emphasized that myths cannot be reduced to factual falsehoods (Bottici 2007; De Vriese 2017), just as a rich tradition of scholarship reminds us that the cultural authority of the modern fact is the product of a contingent history (Poovey 1998; see White 2014), and that this authority is often instrumentalized to serve distorted narratives about reality. All the same, political discourse and theory have yet to shake off the reigning intuition that myths are best countered by exposing them as factually or epistemologically deficient.

More significantly, Graeber and Wengrow's project obscures a theoretical tension that has of late been gaining traction within the long tradition of ideology critique. Once defined by a distinctly German idealist focus on critique and an emphasis on the Marxist concept of false consciousness (Ng 2015), this tradition conventionally positioned the social critic as an external adjudicator, evaluating society from an Archimedean vantage point. Ideology critique has since converged on a more immanent approach (Stahl 2021). In the wake of models offered by philosophical genealogy and the psychoanalytic method (Koopman 2013; Saar 2007; Žižek 1994), as well as from radical democratic theory (Celikates 2018; Rancière 1999; Laclau and Mouffe 2001), contemporary understandings of ideology critique have increasingly shifted toward seeing the objects of their criticism, not as logical ideational structures, but as tacit, often preconscious, systems of social meaning that implicate the critic in the very contradictions they seek to shed light on. How exactly the social critic can grasp the logical structure of such ideas immanently has long been a topic of heated debate (Cooke n.d.; Habermas 1987 [1981]; Horkheimer 1972; Jaeggi 2014). Against the backdrop of an increasingly multipolar, crisis-ridden world, the question turns on whether ideology critics, deprived of their privileged vantage point, can still insist on a rationalist framework of critique that claims to distinguish between the authentic and the alienated, the progressive and the regressive. Pointing to this tension, Yves Winter (2025, 6) rightly observes that ideology critique, thus understood, “must be able to draw from a ‘rational element’ within ideology, in other words, something that is true and that is objective.” While the move toward immanent critique, then, helps ideology critics adopt a more nuanced view both of society's value commitments and of their internal contradictions—as practical systems of belief that are dynamic rather than static, and open to reworking from within—the presumption of such a rational kernel still leaves them in a position of epistemic and moral authority over others. As long as it remains committed to this assumption, immanent ideology critique understands the critic to operate at a special remove from those whose practices they seek to examine: more able to discern what is false, distorted, or morally inconsistent in society, and better positioned to envision paths for overcoming conditions of unfreedom. Emancipation, thus understood, remains at its core a rational endeavor.

Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything encapsulates these more recent developments in ideology critique, along with the double bind that critics in this tradition face as they simultaneously refuse and reproduce the practices they criticize. It is clear that Graeber and Wengrow do not view their subject in terms of the traditional concept of false consciousness, and their genealogical reinterpretation of Rousseau's Second Discourse intimates that Gramsci's antihegemonic practices are close to their heart. It is equally clear that their critique is launched from a standpoint rooted in the idea of a rational truth outside the myth in question, where the rigor of scientific falsification ultimately meets the disruptive tactics of the activist seeking to denaturalize the status quo. From this perspective, our entrenched narratives about property and hierarchical domination reveal their ideological nature—a distorted aspiration to the rational idea of freedom.

But if Graeber and Wengrow's approach reflects where ideology critique currently stands, it also brings its constraints into starker relief. At one level, the fixation in the book's public reception on the accuracy of its empirical claims—rather than on the imaginative shift they aimed to inspire—highlights how narrowly their discourse was confined to an ideological base already committed to the value of envisioning alternatives to the established order. At another level, Graeber and Wengrow's unwitting adoption of the tools and epistemological assumptions of ideology critique also constricts their ability to address the imaginaries in question on their own terms. Too quick to present their critique as emancipatory without acknowledging those who, lacking their plethora of facts and clarity of moral insight, would not experience it as such, the authors miss an opportunity to engage the deeper cognitive attachments people may have to the narratives they set out to unmask. This can paint a rather limited picture of what social criticism can mean.

But if we take seriously Graeber and Wengrow's characterization of Rousseau's conjectural history as a myth, there is reason to question whether this kind of ideology critique is ultimately appropriate to the medium. For all the eccentricity of their take, Graeber and Wengrow are by no means the only ones to read Rousseau's conjectural history in mythic terms. Throughout the reception of the Second Discourse, debates over its truth-status have tended to converge on two traditional camps: those who believe Rousseau's conjectural history was constructed purely as a thought experiment, never intended to be taken literally, and those who believe he did in fact aim to give “a factually accurate description of the original human situation” (Brennan 2020, 586; see Neuhouser 2014; Rousseau 1997 [1755], 132; Scott 1992). As Christopher Kelly (2006, 78) suggested in a landmark survey, a third position that resisted both these answers was to understand Rousseau's prehistory as a “myth.” For Kelly, who rejected this reading himself, the mythic interpretation of Rousseau's prehistory meant ruling out the idea that it was meant to have “any genuine explanatory use.” Instead, its function would be “solely rhetorical, having the goal of stimulating nostalgia for a non-existent past in which the problems of modern life did not exist” (78). In a different vein, another familiar way the concept of myth has been applied to the Second Discourse stems from Carole Pateman's (1988) iconic critique of the social contract tradition as having an obscuring or veiling function. This is something that several readers of Pateman's The Sexual Contract have often drawn out more explicitly, by referring several times to her reading of Rousseau's conjectural history as a “myth” that, deceptively, naturalizes conjugal relations in the state of nature (Anderson 2002, 108; Hirschmann 1990).2

Both these senses in which Rousseau's conjectural history can be considered “mythic” are helpful, in that they emphasize the narrative and figurative features of how the conjectural history helps penetrate into the imaginative framework in which Rousseau expects his readers to operate, as well as the distinctive opaqueness that this introduces to its effect. But the rhetorical and ideological accounts are also partial in that they play down the capacity of these features to be more constructive and, indeed, to advance human freedom. This is an important point of emphasis in the interpretation offered by Emma Planinc (2023) of Rousseau as a “political mythologist” invested in the possibility of an original natural language that could “persuade without convincing” (6, 21). This mythic language, for Planinc, is a form of “storytelling over fact founding” that directs Rousseau's audience away from the realities of the societal status quo he is seeking to denaturalize (2). The image of the natural man is persuasive precisely because it is not meant “to convince us of its truth,” but to provide a vivid contrast between this condition and our distorted nature in civilized society: “Man must be persuaded that he is born free,” she tells us, “if he is to see that everywhere he is in chains” (23–24). So transforming and directing hearts toward freedom crucially rest not on ideological certainty but on creating an awareness that “we do not know ourselves as well as we think we do” (22). While Rousseau's prehistory may lack an explanatory function, it serves an attitudinal one: of organizing and structuring our relationship with that which we do not know.

A definitive verdict on what Rousseau truly intended is outside the scope of this article. But we need not take sides on the question here to see how “mythic” readings of Rousseau's conjectural history offer insight into the possibilities of myth that Graeber and Wengrow's critique overlook. First, as Planinc's mythic reading of Rousseau suggests, myths are not necessarily incompatible with an emancipatory political vision. Second, myths can create awareness of what we do not know. Such an awareness, in turn, is essential for social criticism, a source of epistemic humility, and a recognition of the importance of nonrational commitments for communal welfare and solidarity. Myths about prehistory can help us distance ourselves from the images that hold us captive. When we view the large-scale narratives we tell about our origins through this more expansive mythic lens, we can see that it requires a form of critique that preserves these possibilities. Where more established models of criticizing factual untruths or ideology are predicated on a sense of scientific and ideological knowingness that judges from a perspective external to myths, reversing this mode of criticism might help us embrace the ways myth structures our relationship with opacity without overcoming it. In so doing, we can take more seriously the constructive role that ignorance can play as the negation, rejection, or undoing of knowingness.

We have seen that there is a case for conceiving of prehistories like Rousseau's in mythic terms and that there is a problem of critique specific to myth. Myths, as we elaborate below, can be conceptualized as a specific response to the contingencies that surround us and, in contrast to knowledge and power, and despite their projection of authoritativeness, myths do not aim at recuperating certainty. Rather, they sustain and embed forms of opacity as they persuade nonrationally by reworking and organizing the individual, sociocultural and political responses to what we do not know. In what follows, we outline a framework for a form of critique that foregrounds the significance of these qualities.

If Graeber and Wengrow had missed an important opportunity in conceiving of Rousseau's prehistory as a myth but ultimately subjecting it to a form of ideology critique, what would constitute an approach that's more appropriate to their critical target—and to the imaginative shift they sought to spark? In the remainder of this article, we present a counterpoint to Graeber and Wengrow's critical endeavor, offering a different vision of what the critique of myth can look like. We turn, in particular, to Nastassja Martin's In the Eye of the Wild (2021) as an illustrative example of social critique that takes unknowing as a precondition for engaging mythic narratives that are foundational to our worldviews. Like Graeber and Wengrow, Martin seeks to disarm an especially pervasive set of imaginative frameworks structuring Western culture. But in contrast to Graeber and Wengrow, who engage with indigenous perspectives only insofar as they provide, for the purposes of ideology critique, a critical mirror that reflects back at Europeans their own historicity, Martin discovers in them the ground for an original language that “persuades without convincing.” In turn, she tackles the dangers of denialism regarding the epistemic limits of such a project, by offering instead an aesthetic form of critique bounded by an ethic of learned ignorance. Opacity, on this approach, becomes a central component of philosophical reflection itself. This is an insight that Martin develops through a critical engagement with the trope of “the wild” and, with it, our customary ways of relating to nature.

Both The Dawn of Everything and In the Eye of the Wild are visionary works by anthropologists that tackle longstanding myths ingrained in Western social imaginaries and aspire to loosen the hold they have on our capacity to imagine alternative ways of living. While the former engages in a form of ideology critique aimed at exposing an entrenched narrative about the progress of human civilization as both untrue and morally wrong, the latter reworks our go-to templates for envisioning our relationship to nature, connecting them to dreams and bodily experiences that invite a non-dominating mode of attunement with it. We have sought in this article to present a framework for an approach to critiquing myths that takes seriously the qualities that render them opaque to reason, suggesting that these very qualities can serve an important attitudinal function that the critique of myths should accordingly preserve and strengthen. To assume a position of learned ignorance toward what we take for granted, as we read Martin as demonstrating, is to clear a path for introducing imaginative shifts in historically entrenched, naturalized stories that invite retelling rather than abandonment.

Doing anthropology in a mode sensitive to this rhythm involves for Martin a process of translation that resonates with Merleau-Ponty's, Blumenberg's and Jaspers's central insight that it is yet possible to address the dominant narratives in society, not as ideologies that are illusory and wrong, but as mythologies that have forgotten their indebtedness to what remains ambiguous and opaque. This reframing helps us recognize the continuity linking such narratives to larger traditions of storytelling and interpretive practice, foregrounding their imaginative character as well as their multiplicity. In this sense, the creative process of translating from one iteration of a myth to another does not yield a discourse aimed at establishing a rational truth based on principled agreement. We could, rather, following a thought of Walter Benjamin, argue that such translation “touches” truth (2007 [1955], 80), as the original features of the myth change aesthetic forms and bring the existential needs driving it within the reach of what we can actively relate to. To use a different analogy, we could say with Wittgenstein, “Don't think, but look!” (1986, 66). Just as his famous rabbit–duck illusion reminds us how shifting perspectives can expand what we see, the critical reworking and retelling of our myths can help us cultivate a different political optics—one that sharpens our ability to notice those aspects of those narratives that broaden its range of possibilities. Before all other normative considerations, the standpoint of myth critique first of all demands an ethic of learned ignorance that suspends the contours of a particular shape in order to see and inhabit another.