The Dawn of Everything: Critique of Graeber and Wengrow
Critique of The Dawn of Everything (2021) by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Terry Leahy 2023
In the Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow (2021) want to challenge mainstream popular accounts of the origins and foundations of the state. They are thinking of writers like Yuval Noah Harari (2015) and Jared Diamond (1998). A mainstream view that underlies almost all popular TV documentaries on archaeology. They aim to undo the determinist implications of the mainstream view. That class and the state are inescapable. We just need to wake up and realize that we can do without states. We can overthrow hierarchy if we are willing to do so. I find this a kind of voluntarism. The question they never answer is why class and the state have been such successful inventions of human history. If we want to end class society, we need to know why it happened and what has made it so difficult to get rid of.
The mainstream view
As I see it, the mainstream view has two main contentions.
One is that once agriculture was invented, a surplus became possible. An almost inevitable development is that a ruling class took over society, using the surplus to provision their army. The implication is that there is no going back to a more egalitarian polity, so long as you have agriculture.
The second contention of the mainstream view is that dense concentrations of people, living together in cities, must be organized hierarchically, with a strong state to maintain social coordination. This is what sociologists call ‘functionalism’. The view is that the state and its associated ruling class function to maintain social cohesion and facilitate ‘civilisation’.
Traditionally, the mainstream view sees class and the state as progressive. There are recent writers who continue this tradition. For example, Stephen Pinker (2002), saying that stateless societies are violent and disorganized, and we would never want to go back to that!
In more recent versions of the mainstream view, there is more caution about this evolutionary model. Writers like Jared Diamond acknowledge that ruling classes tend to look after their own interests. That the ordinary peasants of class societies have had a worse diet and more hard work than most hunters and gatherers. At the same time, the mainstream view gets revised like this. We can never go back to this earlier tribal utopia. Now we have agriculture, complex civilisation and large populations, the best we can hope for is to reform the state and class society.
Their critique of the mainstream view
Graeber and Wengrow aim to refute this mainstream account, opening up the option of a more egalitarian, anarchist political future. They are not the first anarchists to present an alternative account of the origins of class and the state, with a similar aim. They do not mention Peter Lamborn Wilson (1998) and Fredy Perlman (1983). They do cite Pierre Clastres (1987;2010) occasionally. They intend to go further. Their critique does not use the term ‘class society’ but does talk about ‘egalitarian’ versus ‘hierarchical’ organisation. Their focus is usually on ‘the state’.
The state does not have a point of origin
Graeber and Wengrow argue that the state, strictly speaking, does not have any historical point of emergence. That is because, elements of the state are present in many of the societies described in ethnographic and historical accounts that we would not call societies with states. Meaning that these aspects of the state are always a potential in human societies, and they are not necessarily connected. It is the (accidental) conjunction of three of these elements that amounts to what Graeber and Wengrow will call a ‘state’.
1. Sovereignty: The monopoly of violence within a territory (Weber 1978).
2. Administration: Some kind of bureaucracy surveys the population and reliably and efficiently collects a surplus for ruling elites.
3. Charismatic politics: Rule is consolidated in a monarchy or some analogous institution. The rule of these leaders is magnified by an ideological apparatus that casts them as godlike figures. Along with this there is a competitive political realm in which aspirant monarchs struggle for power.
I find Graeber and Wengrow’s third criterion, charismatic politics, the hardest to understand or to accept as part of the definition of a state. The effect in the book is to refuse to designate as ‘states’ societies governed by a ruling class through a collegial process — with a limited set of people nominated to be citizens. For example, Sparta or the Roman republic. It makes sense to call these ‘republics’ because they are not ‘democratic’ — the polity does not include major sections of the population. Yet to me such societies are undoubtedly states. The collegial process of governance is the method through which the ruling class imposes its domination on the rest of society. The ‘republic’ is the executive of the ruling class.
The examples of polities like this in the book are always obscure – such as Tlaxcala that came to the aid of the Spanish conquering Mexico against the Aztecs. Teotihuacan, the city that preceded the Aztec empire. They fudge the question of whether these societies with councils running affairs could be republics. From their point of view none of these are ‘states’ because there is no charismatic monarch in control and no competitive arena contesting this control. The effect of their writing on this is to imply that these coordinated complex cities were egalitarian democracies. But there is actually no reason to think that. They were more likely republics run by a ruling elite. The most likely thing is that these cities were serviced by a hinterland of exploited peasants, whose dwellings have not yet shown up in the archaeology.
Also, they do not include as ‘states’ those polities where a ruling class does not have big tickets on itself. The seeming absence of elite graves means democracy where they are concerned.
My view is that all states work through some kind of dominant ideology that represents the ruling class as the people who should be running society. In other words, some version of ‘charisma’ is always present, even if it is not the showy celebration of luxury, power and violence that Graeber and Wengrow have in mind. In a republic the ruling class stresses the egalitarian democratic polity of the members of the elite. They valorise their ‘republican’ virtue and even their ascetic purity vis a vis women, slaves, peasants, and barbarians. That is the way ‘charisma’ is manifested in those polities.
Only certain kinds of ruling class ideology fit Graeber and Wengrows’ definition of charismatic politics. In terms of their definition of the state, modern representative democracies are not really states. There is no charismatic monarch — exhibitionist, openly violent, ruthless, defined as a god. While at a stretch you might see Trump in that role, it is hard to think of Macron or Albanese like that. Yet it is obvious that in these modern representative democracies there is a state and that the capitalist class (behind the scenes) has effective control.
In terms of administration, their second criterion, I am not sure that a predictable and quantitatively accurate extraction of surplus is that relevant in defining a state. If an armed force sent by the ruling class arrives in your village every few years to take away a surplus, it makes sense to see this as class and the state.
In terms of the monopoly of violence. Their understanding of this is very puzzling. Feudal society at the time of the Norman conquest in England is not a ‘state’ according to them because there is no monopoly of violence. I think they mean that William the conqueror reigns over a territory (England and part of France) but does not have a monopoly of violence — because feudal lords have their own armies. Peasants could be drafted to serve in their lord’s army, along with the nobility on horseback. Not like modern states or absolute monarchies — with a national army. This is a good empirical point. However, I do not take it too seriously as defining the absence of a state. In feudalism at the time of William there is a patchwork of small states governed by lords, allied together in a network owing allegiance to a monarch. Together this patchwork of allies constitutes a ruling class and together they have a monopoly of violence vis a vis their peasants – you are ruled by one or other of these lords.
The account they give in the book does not really explain why these three different social inventions came together in a formation that gained traction across the whole world, starting from completely independent sites (China, Middle America, the Middle East, Northern India). In other words, the reality is that there are many examples of the state in history that join together the monopoly of violence, the administration necessary to extract a surplus and an ideological apparatus that elevates the ruling class. If these three elements were merely random and independent inventions of the human species, why have they so often been connected?
The necessary and sufficient conditions for a state
Graeber and Wengrow argue that the usual mainstream account of the origin of the state does not fit the ethnographic or archaeological record. This mainstream account has it that various social institutions inevitably lead to the formation of states and social class. In other words, some combination of the following elements is sufficient for the state and class society, according to the mainstream view. If you find these elements, you will always find the state and class going with them.
1. Agriculture in general.
2. Cereal agriculture.
3. Irrigation agriculture.
4. Large scale cooperation.
5. Cities (dense concentrated populations).
The argument of Graeber and Wengrow is that none of these conditions (or any combination) produces the state as an inevitable consequence. I totally agree with their argument where the first four of these institutions are concerned. On the other hand, none of this is really news to anyone who has been reading the anthropology and archaeology.
To be clear, my view and where I agree with Graeber and Wengrow is this.
• There were stateless classless societies that used agriculture, even cereal agriculture, even irrigation.
• There are lots of examples of stateless classless societies organizing large networks and huge events cooperatively, drawing people from a wide territory.
• There are lots of examples of sophisticated egalitarian cooperation within state and class-based societies — going on alongside the more hierarchical aspects of these societies.
All of this is important for anarchists to understand and contradicts mainstream theories of the origin and necessity for class society.
Where cities are concerned.
Graeber and Wengrow could be right when they say that there have been cities without class and the state. But I am not entirely sure. Their examples of cities without class and the state are always archaeological sites that show no evidence of stratification and elite burials. The houses and food are the same for everyone. For example, an early Mesopotamian city. Teotihuacan in Mexico. In these cases, there could well be a hinterland of peasants that does not really show up in the archaeology. These peasants might have been the subordinate class to an elite living in the urban centre. The egalitarianism of the urban centre itself could indicate a ‘republic’.
Sufficiency and necessity
So, Graeber and Wengrow are largely right that none of these institutions guarantees that a state and social class will follow. However, what is largely missing from their account is an acknowledgement that at least some of these conditions are necessary for class and the state, or necessarily follow from the establishment of a state.
Except in one very rare case (Northwest Pacific America), states and class never arise in the first instance without cereal agriculture. In other words, cereal agriculture, and the stored surplus of food that is made possible through that, is a necessary condition for the state and class to get established (Scarre & Fagan 2016).
Where irrigation is concerned the argument of Michael Mann (1986) makes sense. Where a whole region of the world has been gradually taken over by class societies and states, the origin point of this development is almost always some kind of irrigation agriculture. Experiments in the state and class society that start off in these irrigation-based societies trap the population. It is hard to leave and live in the surrounding desert. This provides a point of consolidation for state formation in the surrounding region. In regions where the state and class get going without this anchor point, they often ended up by collapsing — with people returning to a more egalitarian and decentralized polity. For example, Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe. In other words, irrigation agriculture is necessary for a process of state consolidation and expansion to get started. For example, Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Indus, the Aztecs (chinampas and the lake), the Incas, China, the Maya (cenotes and terraces fertilized with swamp mud).
States always have cities. They are the political centres from which rule of the hinterland is organized. Before modern times, the army of the state had to be able to walk to the perimeter and be supplied from this centre. Gideon Sjoberg (1965) is good on this topic. In other words, cities are necessary for states to operate.
States are not a foregone conclusion
The mainstream account portrays the gradual consolidation of states as a done deal once they have been started. There is no going back from the state and social class. Graeber and Wengrow want to contest this gloomy prospect. They argue that once established, the state does not inevitably consolidate itself and expand forever and ever. Whole state regimes can collapse and be replaced by more egalitarian polities.
I totally agree with this up to a point. The Maya, Cahokia and even the Roman Empire are good examples. Again, this is not huge news to anyone who has been reading in this field. The anarchist sources are not mentioned by Graeber and Wengrow – Peter Lamborn Wilson (1998) also a social scientist, is the key anarchist author.
What they do not say.
First, they are reluctant to admit that these collapses seem to have come with vast depopulation and death. For example, the Maya, the Roman Empire. They tend to act as though all these peasants migrated elsewhere, but the archaeology does not support that view.
The second point is probably more important. In almost every case that we know about, the state and social class eventually comes back and re-establishes itself. The fate of the Roman Empire is particularly depressing. China’s peasant rebellions and invasions by egalitarian pastoralists. Leading to new dynasties and the re-furbishing of class relations. Not to mention the revolutions of the modern period — with the revolutionary leadership initiating a new process of class formation. We clearly need some new thinking if we are to prevent this return of the state. They do not provide this. Their angle seems to be, we just need to try harder and be convinced that this is how we want to go.
The Yucatan is a good example for them. After the Maya collapse there was no return of the state to that region – until the Europeans arrived (900 to 1600).
Their key example is North America, where, they say, social class and the state were rejected after the awful case of Cahokia. It may be that North America is a good example where the state never came back (1100 to 1600). Yet I find this a bit of a strange argument. Firstly, the states of the Americas were millennia later than those in Europe. Their argument would be like saying that the people living in what are now Britain and Europe in 3000 BC rejected the state (that they had become aware of in Egypt) and maintained their village tribal egalitarianism as a conscious choice during the bronze age. Clearly the polity of Britain in 3000 BC had little to do with what was going on in Egypt at that time. It took another 3000 years for these two places to be connected through state formation.
At the end of the day, the state and social class have become extremely successful social formations since the development of agriculture. These states have linked up to take over the world. We need to understand the weak points in this assemblage to get to some other place. They do not provide anything useful where this is concerned. Their obsession with the weakness of the state leaves us nothing to explain its strength.
Stateless societies, wars and violence
There is little acknowledgement by Graeber and Wengrow that the north American societies that ‘rejected the state’ were competitive, violent, and cruel patriarchies. Men gained status and authority through heroic daring in local wars with other villages. They tortured captives. They do talk about this at the end of the book. Their discussion of this topic is very annoying. I do not trust their claims that women had a dramatically powerful political role in this region. My reading on the Iroquois suggests that this formal political role for women was compatible with patriarchy in daily life, the division of labour and broader politics outside of the village (Johnson 2016; Hale 2022; Van Den Bogaert 2013). Their argument about this — gender egalitarian and democratic at home balances warlike and dominating outside the village — is a worry.
This balancing theory is contradicted by heaps of examples from other horticultural societies. Patriarchal, competitive warlike societies — within and outside the village — that were also egalitarian and communitarian as far as men were concerned. For example, the Mundurucu of the Amazon (Murphy & Murphy 2004). Melanesia (Gregor & Tuzin 2001). In any case, are we supposed to be reassured by this?
While an earlier anarchist theorist (Clastres 2010) admits and even valorises this violence — as essential to the egalitarian polity of horticultural Amazon societies — Graeber and Wengrow mostly ignore it. Instead, we are shown these north American societies as a bunch of peaceful philosophers. We need some new thinking to avoid a warrior competitive alternative to class society and the state.
Pre-state societies were gender egalitarian and states are patriarchal
As a part of their argument that the state and social class are inventions that can be taken up or discarded, they develop a theory of the relationship of gender to the state. The state and class society depends upon and produces an unequal gender regime. ‘Egalitarian’ societies (meaning those in which men are equal to other men) are societies in which women have equality with men — equal in politics, religion and daily life.
This is an old furphy and recycles Engels’ writing on this from the nineteenth century. Most feminist anthropologists (e.g. Michelle Rosaldo 1974, Ernestine Friedl 1975, Nancy Chodorow 1974) do not take this seriously anymore. These feminist anthropologists stress the universality of patriarchy. They also acknowledge the variety of patriarchal gender regimes in different societies. My view is that patriarchy precedes class and the state, and it is one of the necessary foundations for all class societies. Knowing this provides us with a way of understanding why class and the state are so hard to get rid of. And an analysis of what we need to do to make them go away permanently.
Reading any ethnography of an Indigenous pre-class society you will soon see why recent feminist anthropologists are arguing that patriarchy is pretty well universal — despite the diversity of particular gender regimes. For both hunter gatherer and horticulturalist stateless societies. For examples see: Colin Turnbull (1961) on the Mbuti; Marjorie Shostak (1981) on the !Kung; Yolanda and Robert Murphy on the Munduruçu (2004); Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen (1968), Phyllis Kaberry (2004), A.P. Elkin (1966), Kenneth Maddock (1982) , W.H. Edwards (ed. 1998) on the Australian Aborigines; anything at all on Melanesia (e.g. Harris 1975; Meggitt 1965; Gregor & Tuzin 2001).
Not that these patriarchies are all equally bad or all the same. Typically, there is a sphere of women’s culture and women’s work that is independent of male control.
My reading of the ethnographic accounts is that there is no clear relationship between the severity of patriarchy and other issues. Comparatively the intensity of patriarchy varies in global society today. In some places patriarchy is quite mild. But class is entrenched everywhere. Ancient Rome was very patriarchal, as Graeber and Wengrow say, but not as bad as the legal structures suggest. The Munduruçu of the Amazon, a stateless communitarian horticulturalist society, were just as patriarchal as the Romans (Murphy & Murphy 2004).
There is a small school of academics who would agree with Graeber and Wengrow on this. I suspect that many of these writers are socialists who cannot admit that Engels might have been wrong. What I find in this writing is a blindness to issues that contemporary feminism is concerned with.
A recent review of Graeber and Wengrow from the Climate and Capitalism website is a typical example. The authors of that review, Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale (2021), are arguing the total Engels line. It is class society that has invented patriarchy. The books they cite as examples of gender egalitarian Indigenous societies in fact show these societies to be patriarchal. But they are not reading them like this (for example Shostak 1981; Kaberry 2004; Turnbull 1961).
Recent writing in this tradition relies to a large extent on older ethnographies that describe what was going on before colonial influences. For example, Phyllis Kaberry (2004) on Indigenous Australia (1938 – the Kimberleys). These anthropological sources are setting up their descriptions in the context of their day. A context that treats Indigenous societies as atavistic and brutal. The imperial project is being justified by presenting Indigenous women as downtrodden slaves — who had to be rescued by civilisation. These early ethnographies want to set the record straight and explain the errors in those Victorian assumptions. Women were not slaves and drudges, their opinions were important, they had choices about marriage, there were secret women’s ceremonies. More recent authors in this (Engels based) tradition take these early ethnographic writings as evidence of gender egalitarian societies — rather than looking at the patriarchal social order that these writings also reveal.
The problem for me is that Graeber and Wengrow get the causal arrow in the wrong direction. Their view is that the state creates the patriarchal family. For me, patriarchy is an essential foundation for states, but they did not invent it (Leahy 2017; Firestone 1972; Reich 1970; Chodorow 1974).
Their example of Minoan society is fascinating. Graeber and Wengrow argue that the archaeology suggests a gender egalitarian polity led by priestesses. They could be right about this. I do not think patriarchy comes out of hard-wired sex differences in temperament and intellect, so nothing is impossible. My guess is that Minoan civilisation was a class/state society with peasants working to produce a surplus appropriated by a ruling class (Scarre & Fagan 2016). That ruling class might have been led by a cohort of priestesses. But whether this translated into real power for women (even in the upper class) is arguable and hard to know.
I have had a look at the Minoan artworks Graeber and Wengrow are talking about, and it would be hard to make anything of them, there are so few in the first place. They could be showing a scene taking place in heaven, for all we know now. Anthropologists have pointed out that quite a lot of patriarchal societies have women as goddesses, cult leaders or priestesses. The Greeks had Athena and the oracle at Delphi to give an example. India has Kali and Bali has Rangda.
It may be that the Minoan civilisation is a glorious exception where patriarchy is concerned. But it is nevertheless exceptional. Class societies have relied on patriarchy to create the psychological preconditions necessary for class and the state to function. They have done this by working with the tools already available from pre-class societies. This turns out to be a key weakness of class in the present period of history. Patriarchy can be defeated, and that victory used to consolidate an end to class society (Leahy 2017).
The State is less powerful than we think
Graeber and Wengrow point out that pre-modern states do not have real control in all the territory that they theoretically own. In addition, in state-based societies, democratic local bodies often organize the cooperative complexity that functionalists credit to the state apparatus.
As they do acknowledge, James Scott is one of the key theorists who has run this argument (2010). To that extent it is not news. Scott talks about the way that tribal people on the periphery of the state tended to run their own affairs most of the time. Detailed studies show how local democratic cooperation ran complex projects like irrigation works – even when a state was nominally in charge. Carol Warren (1993) is great on the Balinese subak system for irrigation. These insights into the way states operate are not entirely new. In the Grundrisse, Marx (1966) argues that only capitalism attempts to control the working process of the subordinate class. He explains the way feudal societies left the detailed organisation of agriculture up to village bodies and peasant farmers themselves — with the ruling class extracting a surplus as tribute after the production process had been completed.
My view is that pre-capitalist class societies were typically organized as villages largely running their own affairs — and providing tribute to a centrally located ruling class. Even where there were slaves, oversight of agricultural production was delegated to the slaves.
Clearly there are cases that are the opposite. As Graeber and Wengrow say, the ancient Egyptians and the Incas kept a very tight account of what their subjects were doing. But that does not make them ‘states’ while ancient Bali and feudal England are something else.
Graeber and Wengrow are right that we overstate the dominance of the state as a social formation — when we forget that much of the world was run by stateless horticulturalists and hunters and gatherers till quite recently. Discovery channel docos concentrate on great works of the state because that looks good, is easiest to show on TV and fits with a narrative of class society — that treats modern capitalism as an inevitable progression.
Conclusion
In the end Graeber and Wengrows’ position comes down to a kind of voluntarism. We just need to realize that we do not have to live like this and throw off our oppressors. What this would look like as a polity, an economy, is not really clear. The main problem is the one everyone is aware of, even if most people would not be able to put it into words. The world has gone through many attempts to throw off class society and the state. Sometimes these revolutions have been successful but so far, they have not led to any lasting victory. Why are class and the state so persistent and how can we get rid of them?
This review has begun to frame an alternative to their perspective by making the following suggestions (see also Leahy 2017).
• Class, and its accompanying state are inventions of the human species
• They do have a historical point of origin and arose independently in a number of regions around the world
• In each of these regions, the initial site of class and the state was a society using cereal agriculture and some form of irrigation
• From these anchor points, class society spread into the surrounding region and became established
• Class societies have a number of features in common, both those that define it and the conditions that make class and the state possible
• My definition would be an effective monopoly of violence in a territory (the state) and an extraction of surplus (by the state) to supply the ruling class and their army
• As conditions necessary for class and the state I nominate patriarchy, agriculture, a ruling class ideology and cities
• Patriarchy and agriculture — as conditions that enable class societies — do not inevitably produce class and the state
Some issues that I have not tackled in this review are as follows. First a somewhat obvious point. In defining class society, we need to recognize that classes are organized as families — the extraction of surplus, class power, subordinate class position are all experienced by families. To go on to more substantial matters. I have not considered the roots of patriarchy, why it has been so widespread, how patriarchy backs up class society, why patriarchy is vulnerable today. I have not asked how class societies first get going in an original context of tribal stateless society. And indeed, why class and the state are so successful and so hard to abolish — despite many victorious revolutions and the collapse of many class societies.
For some further ideas on these topics see my podcast series:
Terry Leahy (2023 Podcast series) https://www.buzzsprout.com/2014361 (esp. episodes 17th August 2022 to 28th August 2022/ episodes 19th September 2022 to 22nd September 2022/ 5th October 2022/ 4th July and 8th July 2022).
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