L'alba di tutto

Una nuova storia dell'umanità

Hardcover, 752 pages

Italiano language

Published Jan. 31, 2022 by Rizzoli.

ISBN:
978-88-17-15882-4
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5 stars (3 reviews)

Da dove nascono la guerra, l'avidità, lo sfruttamento, l'insensibilità alle sofferenze altrui? E qual è l'origine della disuguaglianza, ormai riconosciuta come uno dei problemi più drammatici e radicati del nostro tempo? Da secoli, le risposte a queste domande si limitano a rielaborare le visioni contrapposte dei due padri della filosofia politica: Jean-Jacques Rousseau e Thomas Hobbes. Stando al primo, per la maggior parte della loro esistenza gli esseri umani hanno vissuto in minuscoli gruppi ugualitari di cacciatori-raccoglitori. A un certo punto, però, a incrinare quel quadro idilliaco è arrivata l'agricoltura, che ha portato alla nascita della proprietà privata. Poi sono apparse le città, e con esse si è affermata l'organizzazione fortemente gerarchica di quella che chiamiamo «civiltà». Per Hobbes, al contrario, la necessità di imporre un rigido ordine sociale si è imposta per contenere la natura individualista e violenta dell'essere umano, altrimenti sarebbe stato impossibile progredire organizzandosi in grandi gruppi. …

2 editions

Beyond great.

5 stars

Dream quests. Empires without war. Women leadership. A city centered around hallucinogenic journeys filled with weird architecture. An enlightenment of democratic settlements blossoming from the ruins of a centralized, aggressive kingdom throughout the current USA. Being able to travel across all of North America and find allied clans who must help you, even though you don't share the same language. People groups taking up farming, and then discarding it. The potential origins of private property. Axes of ideas that lead to entrenched arbitrary power, and the multiplicative danger that comes when multiple axes are involved.

The authors do cherry-pick examples from history to support their thesis that people throughout history lived in a wide variety of political structures, and that history is not stuck in a set evolutionary channel, because, well, that's what actually happened. History is much more complicated than most people think, and this means that the present …

It matters what thoughts think

4 stars

A tale of two David's: Graeber's final book, co-authored with Wengrow, is an epic volume of archaeology and anthropology that decentres and challenges accepted patterns of western thought that many social scientists present as facts. In particular, the authors take aim at books like Sapiens by showing how they proliferate accepted but unproven myths about human behaviour without following the evidence. As a book of critique and challenge, it is funny, thoughtful, and sharp. Some of the ideas, such as that the European idea of democracy may have originated from colonised Native American cultures, are radical but well argued.

Despite this, there are some flaws. A couple of chapters run far too long with too much repetition, and the scope of societies that are used to construct the arguments is limited. Also, there is a repeated insistence of humanist thought, dismissing animal or nonhuman relationships as unrelated to the story. …