The 17th-century Huron chief Kondiaronk can still teach us valuable lessons

Ten years ago, David Graeber was a leading figure of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He and his fellow protesters camped out in Zucotti Park, storing $800,000 of donations in trash bags because they didn’t believe in banks.

The American anthropologist and anarchist activist called this an experiment in ‘post-bureaucratic living’. But such politics made Graeber persona non grata at US universities, so he moved to Britain where, in 2013, he became a full professor at the LSE. There, until his death last year aged 59, he imagined anarchist utopias and indicted what he took to be an oxymoron: western civilisation.

In Debt: The First 5,000 Years he called for a biblical-style ‘jubilee’ — wiping out sovereign and consumer debts — which made him popular with his students. In Bullshit Jobs he complained that most white-collar jobs were meaningless and that technological advances had led to people working more, not less. In The Utopia of Rules he noted that, instead of finding a cure for cancer, the most dramatic recent medical breakthroughs have been drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac that serve to ensure that ‘these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally crazy’. In a better society, he told me, technological innovation would have focused on enabling us to fly with jet packs rather than holding us down with meds.

Now comes The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, an enjoyable rant of 700-odd pages that Graeber and the University of London archaeology professor David Wengrow spent ten years writing. It opposes what might be called the Private Frazer theory of human history, whereby we’re doomed to live in unequal societies, doing jobs that demean us, all the while rapaciously exploiting nature and each other. That philosophy was set out most clearly, they suppose, by Yuval Noah Harari in his 2014 bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.