L'alba di tutto - BookWyrm

Hardcover, 752 pages

Italiano language

Published Jan. 31, 2022 by Rizzoli.

ISBN:: 978-88-17-15882-4

(2 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. …

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. Quasi tutti conoscono queste due storie alternative, almeno nelle loro linee generali: riassumono le idee più diffuse sulla storia dell'umanità e la sua evoluzione, e hanno contribuito a definire la nostra visione del mondo. Ma pongono anche un problema: entrambe dipingono la disuguaglianza come una tragica necessità; un elemento che non potremo mai cancellare del tutto, in quanto intrinsecamente legato al vivere comune. Una visione che non convince affatto gli autori di questo libro, decisi a gettare nuova luce sul passato della nostra specie. In una sintesi tanto meticolosa quanto di largo respiro, che coniuga i risultati delle ricerche storiche e archeologiche più recenti al contributo di pensatori provenienti da culture diverse da quella occidentale, il sociologo David Graeber e l'archeologo David Wengrow ci raccontano una storia diversa – più articolata e ricca di chiaroscuri – dell'evoluzione sociale dell'Homo sapiens. Una storia illuminante e attendibile, dalla quale ripartire per provare a immaginare un futuro diverso.

2 editions

Jamin Bogi reviewed The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber

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 …

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 can be different as well.

I finished the book wanting so much more about how societies can break free from solidified power structures, but that's no criticism of the book. It also has made me much more interested in learning anarchist theory, on various forms of voluntary organization. And, and, I really want to know how an anarchic grouping of people could (could they?) resist a more centralized attacker.

Read this! Your mind will be cracked open, over and over.

pdotb@wyrms.de reviewed The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber

Didn't really work for me, I'm afraid...

4 stars

It feels odd giving anything but an enthusiastic review to a book co-authored by the late, great David Graeber, but I'm afraid this one didn't really work for me. In my (and perhaps the book's?) partial defence, the circumstances weren't ideal. I read it as an ebook (so hard to flip back to check on facts) and, what's more, as a library ebook (so with limited time to finish it). I also haven't really been firing on all cylinders over the break, so maybe that's part of the problem? Anyway, if you take all those mitigating factors away, what I think we're left with is a book that somewhat uncomfortably straddles an attempt to provide a comprehensive, but alternative, 'big history', with an attempt to advance a counter to the default assumption of a teleology of societal evolution, that holds that agriculture is inevitable (and so hunter-gatherers are really just …

It feels odd giving anything but an enthusiastic review to a book co-authored by the late, great David Graeber, but I'm afraid this one didn't really work for me. In my (and perhaps the book's?) partial defence, the circumstances weren't ideal. I read it as an ebook (so hard to flip back to check on facts) and, what's more, as a library ebook (so with limited time to finish it). I also haven't really been firing on all cylinders over the break, so maybe that's part of the problem? Anyway, if you take all those mitigating factors away, what I think we're left with is a book that somewhat uncomfortably straddles an attempt to provide a comprehensive, but alternative, 'big history', with an attempt to advance a counter to the default assumption of a teleology of societal evolution, that holds that agriculture is inevitable (and so hunter-gatherers are really just proto-farmers) together with an assumption that the surplus that agriculture provides will inevitably lead to administration, bureaucracy, and loss of freedom. If felt to me that the latter arguments were rather lost in the weight of historical/pre-historical detail, while the former big history was hard to follow as it jumped around trying to justify the argument. It's also, to be frank, a pretty long book, which seems to me to require either stamina (which I seem to be lacking at the moment) or a compelling narrative (which also seemed to be lacking). There was lots of good stuff offering an alternative to Eurocentric views on North American prehistory, and it would probably work pretty well as something to dip into for such insights, but for me, as a straight read-through, I'm afraid it didn't really work.