The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . .
Essays
-
- USD 12.99
-
- USD 12.99
Descripción editorial
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. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic books as Debt and the breakout New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow), Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes.
There are converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics is dominated by either business as usual or nostalgia for a mythical past. Thinking against the grain, Graeber was one of the few who dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future—to imagine a social order based on humans’ fundamental freedom. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time— inequality, technology, the identity of “the West,” democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest—he challenges the old assumptions about political life. A trenchant critic of the order of things, and driven by a bold imagination and a passionate commitment to human freedom, he offers hope that our world can be different.
During a moment of daunting upheaval and pervasive despair, the incisive, entertaining, and urgent essays collected in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . , edited and with an introduction by Nika Dubrovsky and with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit, make for essential and inspiring reading. They are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an iconic, playful, necessary thinker.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This brilliant posthumous collection of essays by, and interviews with, anthropologist Graeber (The Dawn of Everything) serves as a revealing portrait of Graeber himself. In the interviews, he discusses his childhood as the son of lefty radicals, his teenage political coming-of-age, and his transformation into a public intellectual during the 2008 Occupy protests. The essays, meanwhile, function as a medley of his favorite themes. In his ambitious entry on the global history of democracy—which he sees at work not in "coercive" modern nation states but in egalitarian societies of the ancient and pre-colonized world that featured "ordinary people collectively managing their own affairs"—Graeber argues that people don't need to be coerced into cooperation, and aren't purely self-interested actors, but are inherently motivated by the desire to find consensus. This theme is taken up with gusto in his essay on play, which is also the grandest example of Graeber giving free rein to his restless intellect. Beginning with the "evolution through mutual aid" theory of 19th-century anarchist and naturalist Peter Kropotkin, who emphasized the role of cooperation and play in the natural world over the struggle of individuals, Graeber eventually leaps to particle physics, noting that the unpredictable wobble of the electron "is in no sense competing with other electrons," and thus that "at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake." It's an invigorating testament to a life spent challenging the status quo.
