THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER AND BBC HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEARFINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2022'Pacey and potentially revolutionary' Sunday Times'Iconoclastic and irreverent ... an exhilarating read' The GuardianFor generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - eithe...

'Spectacular and terrifyingly true' Owen Jones'Explosive' John McDonnell, New Statesman, Books of the Year'Thought-provoking and funny' The TimesFT BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018, THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018, NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018 and CITY AM BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018Be honest: if your job didn't exist, would anybody miss it? Have you ever wondered why not? Up to 40% of us secretly belie...

Brought to you by Penguin.For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a reaction to indigenous critiques of European society, and why they are wro...

Now in audio, the updated and expanded edition : David Graeber’s “fresh . . . fascinating . . . thought-provoking . . . and exceedingly timely” (Financial Times) history of debtHere anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the ...

**Brought to you by Penguin.Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, the iconic and bestselling David Graeber's most important essays and interviews.**‘The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently,’ wrote David Graeber. This new collection brings together the renowned anthropologist, author and activist’s most visionary essays, showing him imagining a new understanding of the past – a...

Brought to you by Penguin.The Enlightenment did not begin in Europe. Its true origins lie thousands of miles away on the island of Madagascar, in the late seventeenth century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. This was the Golden Age of Piracy, a period of violent buccaneering and rollicking legends - but it was also, argues anthropologist David Graeber, a brief window of radical democracy, as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian princ...

David Graeber was not only one of today’s most important living thinkers, but also one of the most influential. He was also one of the very few engaged intellectuals who has a proven track record of effective militancy on a world scale, and his impact on the international left cannot be overstated.Graeber has offered up perhaps the most credible path for exiting capitalism—as much through his writing about debt, bureaucracy, or “bullshit jobs” as through his crucial involvement in ...

Everywhere anarchism is on the upswing as a political philosophy—everywhere, that is, except the academy. Anarchists repeatedly appeal to anthropologists for ideas about how society might be reorganized on a more egalitarian, less alienating basis. Anthropologists, terrified of being accused of romanticism, respond with silence . . . . But what if they didn't?This pamphlet ponders what that response would be, and explores the implications of linking anthropology to anarchism. Here,...

What if the modern economy is full of jobs that everyone secretly knows are meaningless—but no one is allowed to admit it? In this incendiary and darkly funny essay, anthropologist David Graeber takes a flamethrower to the world of pointless bureaucracy, soul-crushing middle management, and the quiet misery of workers paid to pretend.Bullshit Jobs is part polemic, part social theory, and part cathartic scream—a razor-sharp diagnosis of a system that rewards appearance over substance...

In anthropology as much as in popular imagination, kings are figures of fascination and intrigue, heroes or tyrants in ways presidents and prime ministers can never be. This collection of essays by two of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists—David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins—explores what kingship actually is, historically and anthropologically. As they show, kings are symbols for more than just sovereignty: indeed, the study of kingship offers a unique window into fundamental d...

This manifesto is the definitive work of Abdullah Öcalan, crucial for understanding the Kurdish revolution. Here Öcalan outlines a democratic alternative for the Middle East.A criticism that limits itself to capitalism is too superficial, Öcalan argues, and turns his eyes to the underlying structures of civilization. Rethinking the methods of understanding culture, politics, and society, he provides the tools for what he calls a sociology of freedom.Civilization: The Age of...

Available in English for the first time, anthropologist Carlo Severi’s The Chimera Principle breaks new theoretical ground for the study of ritual, iconographic technologies, and oral traditions among non-literate peoples. Setting himself against a tradition that has long seen the memory of people “without writing”—which relies on such ephemeral records as ornaments, body painting, and masks—as fundamentally disordered or doomed to failure, he argues strenuously that ritual action...