Does the state usher in a special stage in history? Probing the Dawn of Everything: A new history of humanity

Abstract

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow suggest that almost all modern features of social structures— cities, religious rituals, kingships, accounting practices, rational arguments, private property, and so on—date to epochs prior to the neolithic revolution. They question the characterisation of the introduction of agriculture as a ‘revolution’. This paper distils Graeber and Wengrow's contribution into two core theses. The first is that all social structures are underpinned by a common and universal consciousness based on the quest for both freedom and identity, which explains the continuity of the same basic consciousness throughout history. This undermines stadial evolutionary theories. The second thesis is that the state, starting with the Pharaoh's civilisation, ushers in a special stage in history, as it suppresses various cherished freedoms. While this paper welcomes Graeber and Wengrow's first thesis, it finds the second thesis to be problematic. The suppression of freedom occurs also in pre-Pharaoh social structures. Of more importance, their second thesis advances a stadial theory, which is inconsistent with the first thesis. This paper puts forward an alternative account of the origin of the state based on Franz Steiner's theory of slavery. While Graeber and Wengrow highly commend Steiner's theory, they appear not cognisant of the fact that it challenges their second thesis.