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Comment by diego_moita | Hacker News Reader

Began "The Dawn of Everything" about a week ago, still on chapter 3.

Chapter 2 was very, very good. Worth the whole book alone. It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"? Then he goes to show how the themes of liberty and social equality came from Canadian First Nations criticism of western culture. It is very well argued, solid and mind-blowing.

Sometimes the book gets too much into petty fights. I didn't like its takes on Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" or Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel". But that's a matter of my personal taste.

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The problem with that part of the book is that it's wildly historically inaccurate. The Diggers and the Levellers were not just trying to enact a much more egalitarian society 100 years before Rousseau but were also (along with a bunch of other non conformist thinkers and doers across Europe) busy producing a vast body of populist pamphlets that later Enlightenment thinkers drew on, stripped of their theological content and rendered more palatable. Dismissing these as peasant revolts is the sort of intellectual snobbery that most early modern historians got over 50 years ago when it was realised that the Enlightenment didn't suddenly spring from nothing in France in 1715 and actually started much earlier in the protestant lands. Maybe this hasn't penetrated David Graeber's corner of academia yet?

It's good to see the Jesuit Relations (basically the National Geographic of its time) being introduced to a popular audience but the notion that the ideals of liberty and social equality didn't exist in European thought prior to contact between American and European cultures is just wrong.

> It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"? Then he goes to show how the themes of liberty and social equality came from Canadian First Nations criticism of western culture

Well, La Boétie's "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" dates back to 200 years before Rousseau, and I wouldn't say it was inspired by American Indians. I am not saying that the discovery and then the deep relations that France did have with American Indians did not play an important in the literature and reflections: on the contrary just a bit after La Boétie's time, Montaigne integrated them in his thinking. That was still over 150 years before Rousseau.

Edit: There were other major transformations at work, like the fact that before 1500, writers would either be lords or strongly depend on King or lords both for their income and for being allowed to publish. It was a Middle Age organisation, with a chivalry based nobility; writing essays was not a thing, the number of themes was as reduced as the number of forms. Then society organisation changed, bourgeoisie and nobles started mixing more and more; writing was more long-form (technical reasons come into play too) and of course expanded the number of themes it dealt with.

There were plenty of Westerners who were concerned with inequality -- there were numerous failed peasant rebellions throughout Europe ever since the Middle Ages.

Having read too much history for fun and jobs, the comment sounds wrong. You can go back to the Roman republic to find people concerned about this (Gracchi brothers).

Or the Book of James about 2000 years ago (in the Roman Empire).

Or some parts of Jewish scripture and the New Testament.

As clarified in the other reply by the other commenter here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29195026

The claim isn't actually that inequality wasn't a topic, the claim is that discussing inequality within the framing that equality might actually be the natural state of thing, or at least just as natural… that was a novel topic at the time of Rousseau.

And sure, it's probably more fair to talk about why even that topic was burgeoning in popularity rather than to imply that it was truly novel.

He fully addresses that in the book. Don't take my word for it, I don't have his explaining skills.

But what he addresses is radical equality, as a fundamental value, as opposed to "less inequality". Equality under a ruler or rebellion against abuses is not the same as thinking the whole society as composed of equals. Think of no-slavery, equality among genders, sexual freedom, etc. Even thinkers that thought about equality before Iluminism (e.g. Thomas More) didn't go that far.

I strongly recommend you reading, at least, chapter 2 in the book. Is way deeper than what I explain.

To give one example, the leaders of the Münster Rebellion of 1534 certainly weren't content with "less inequality."

How would contact with “First Nations” in any way help European elites to come to the concept of the radical equality you are describing? They neither had nor believed in any of these things.

> But what he addresses is radical equality, as a fundamental value, as opposed to "less inequality".

Typical Graeber. Total nonsense. Radical equality has multi-origins in religious cults for 1000s of years. It has been part of 'Western' history writing for almost as long as we have historical narratives.

Pretty much as far as we can tell these ideas are resurfacing over and over in every big culture. For most we have no documentation but its clear there and has been documented lots of time.

I haven't read the book but I assume here Rousseau is serving as an emblem for the Enlightenment (or an aspect of it at least), which is generally regarded as uhh kind of a big deal. That there were earlier Europeans here and there who discussed some of the same concepts is of little significance.

The Enlightenment didn’t grew out of concerns for inequality, it wasn’t even its big point even though the Enlightenment was a very intellectually diverse movement. Read Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment, it contains the word “equality” exactly zero times.

Also, it is quite ironic to mention the thought of Rousseau as an exemplar of the Enlightenment when he is often put into the camp of Counter-Enlightenment.

I'm not as familiar with how anthropologists feel about Yuval Harari, but fwiw Graeber is far from unique amongst academic anthropologists in his distaste for Jared Diamond's work and the misconceptions and myths that it spread

It's pretty common in social science/philosophy that a paradigm gets popular, overly drawn upon and that then pisses off the next commentators.

Graener & Wengrove are as susceptible to this as others.

I mean... the origins of enlightenment liberalism, the origin of money and such don't really have distinct answers. There are always multiple, arguable narratives.

The "paradigm" concept is all about narrowing these to simple causal chains and dynamics... which then limits the next generation.

We love paradigms, anti-paradigms, paradigm shifts... So, every author likes to rebel against the preceding simplification and argue their own, calling them myths and misconceptions.

For the most part, imo, excess is what drives it all. The Jared Diamond paradigms, YNH's, Marx's... Graener & Wengrow are focused on challenging their paradigms as much as they are on promoting their own.

If successful, these new paradigms develop their own excesses and a new generation can get pissy with them.

>It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"?

I really hope he doesn't say that because Rousseau is just the high point of a debate about luxury and sociability that runs throughout the whole eighteenth century. He and others like him were influenced by travelogues from the New World describing natives as living simply and equitably. But he was equally influenced by the objective conditions of early modern capitalism, ancient Stoicism, and Christian writings about greed and pride. He wrote his own 'Confessions' in tribute to St.Augustine, after all.

I like Graeber, and he has a truly original mind, but he doesn't have the best reputation in academia for being 100% scholarly.

I think those fights/takes are Wengrow's.

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