The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays

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. (Nov.)