Displacing the State of Nature: A Disagreement with Graeber and Wengrow

Abstract

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything offers a salutary corrective to modern political theory, with its choice between two forms of the “state of nature”: Hobbes’s negative vision of bloodthirsty humans held in check only by the violent power of the sovereign, and Rousseau’s apparently more positive vision of naturally equal humans corrupted by the introduction of agriculture and metallurgy. However, the alternative Graeber and Wengrow offer –a world of imaginative and experimental humans freely choosing different forms of society– excessively downplays the political mediating role of non-human things. This move, in turn, is overly dependent on a modernist ontology that opposes free human thought to mechanically deterministic things. Drawing on the insights of Actor-Network Theory in particular, this article argues for the central role of inanimate objects in the political sphere.