David Graeber (1961–2020)

David Graeber was a USA anthropologist, author, and anarchist activist who challenged conventional ideas about economics, bureaucracy, politics, work, democracy, and the history of human civilization. Born in New York City in 1961, Graeber grew up in a working-class family. He earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1996, where he studied under the influential anthropologist Marshall Sahlins.

Graeber was interested in societies that operated with little hierarchy, centralized authority, or market exchange. His anthropology consequently became closely connected to his anarchist political philosophy. He argued that anthropology provided evidence that human beings have repeatedly organized themselves through cooperation, mutual aid, voluntary association, and decentralized decision-making.

Graeber was an active participant in the protests surrounding the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa. He later became one of the intellectual figures associated with Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and he helped popularize the phrase “the 99%.”

His 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years transformed the way many readers thought about money and economic history. In The Utopia of Rules (2015), he attacked the growth of bureaucracy and the increasingly absurd complexity of modern institutions. His 2018 book Bullshit Jobs examined why modern economies create enormous numbers of jobs that workers themselves regard as pointless or socially unnecessary.

Graeber's final work, The Dawn of Everything, challenged the idea that human societies inevitably progressed from egalitarian bands to agriculture, cities, hierarchy, and centralized states. Instead, Graeber and co-author David Wengrow present history as extraordinarily diverse and experimental.

Graeber died unexpectedly in Venice, Italy, in September 2020 at the age of 59. His influence has continued to grow, particularly among anarchists, anti-work activists, anthropologists, economic critics, and people interested in creating alternative forms of society. His central message was profoundly utopian: the world we inhabit is something human beings have made—and therefore something human beings can make differently.

Books

Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011)

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021, with David Wengrow)

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2015)

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004)

Direct Action: An Ethnography (2009)

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (2013)

Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (2007)

Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (2001)

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (2022, posthumous)

Quotes

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” — The Utopia of Rules

“Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.” — Direct Action: An Ethnography

“Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.” — “Are You an Anarchist?”