I'm not the author, but obligatory "not sure why this is being down-voted." I've been wondering about Graeber for a while, since his work seems suspiciously close to "messages certain people desperately want to hear" and I have strong priors against those accounts, regardless of which "side" they come from.
Would love to hear perspective on this. The book would be a serious investment.
below is a review I wrote of the book. despite my criticism, I'm glad I read it. But for a lot of people the ROI won't be good.
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I rated this one star, but understand the context, that I am very sympathetic to both the mission and perspective of the authors. I wanted to love this, and want them to be right. In general their key points are interesting ones to consider. The modern state is not inevitable. Past people were as smart and creative as we are, and likely experimented with a vastly greater range of societies than we are familiar with. We could learn a lot from them, and should consider trying more experiments ourselves. As they assert, few others are attempting to broadly reconsider recent evidence in the way they do.
But despite that, there is so much wrong with their execution. They started with their conclusion, and fit everything to that. Despite being massively long, the book is very short on actual evidence. It is very long on speculation, horrible logic, and frustrating repetition.
My suggestion is to gain exposure to the ideas, by reading few solid reviews of it. Then just keep those ideas in mind, and follow other more specific evidence cases, by more responsible scholars.
Would love to hear perspective on this. The book would be a serious investment.