In this final class on The Dawn of Everything, we complete Graeber and Wengrow’s challenge to determinism. Rather than tracing an evolutionary path to the present, they explore roads not taken—social arrangements that flourished for centuries or millennia but represent alternative possibilities we abandoned. If people organized themselves differently for extended periods, then alternative futures remain available.
Fighting Two-Inch Tall Demons
Graeber and Wengrow begin their conclusion with a methodological reflection: if they had written this book “like typical academics,” it would have been two or three times as long. Instead of exhaustively defending every interpretive choice against every possible scholarly objection, they chose to focus on what happened historically and only engage in debate when addressing widespread misconceptions—ideas circulating beyond academia that shape public understanding.
This approach saves readers from watching authors “engaged in a constant battle with demons who were in fact two inches tall.” The metaphor resonates in academic contexts where much scholarly energy goes toward minor interpretive disputes rather than challenging consequential misconceptions. By targeting ideas that actually shape policy and public discourse—like Diamond’s environmental determinism or Pinker’s evolutionary psychology narratives—they aimed to make anthropology relevant to broader conversations about human possibility.
The Most Stubborn Misconception: Scale and Hierarchy
What is the most stubborn misconception Graeber and Wengrow identify? Not that people are naturally evil (which they consider worse but less persistent), but rather that scale automatically determines structure. This widespread belief holds that as you add more people to a settlement, you automatically require complexity; complexity automatically requires hierarchy; and hierarchy automatically requires chains of command.
This misconception draws power from concepts like Dunbar’s number—the appealing idea that humans can only maintain meaningful relationships with roughly 150 people, beyond which bureaucratic organization becomes necessary. (For their earlier critique of Dunbar’s number, see Egalitarian Cities.) The narrative seems intuitive: larger populations inevitably mean more complex problems, which can only be solved through top-down management.
Yet the archaeological evidence from early cities directly contradicts this assumption. Cities throughout history have been organized in radically different ways—some hierarchical, others based on collective decision-making, still others oscillating between forms. These represent roads not taken in our current trajectory. The problem is that we lack adequate vocabulary to describe this diversity. As soon as we use the word “city,” we import assumptions about hierarchy and centralized control.
Rethinking Civilization Through Marcel Mauss
Graeber and Wengrow invoke French anthropologist Marcel Mauss to challenge another common assumption: that cities invented civilization. Mauss defined a “true civilization” not by urban density but by the existence of large hospitality zones—networks where people could travel and find those who would recognize and host them. This connects to their earlier argument about civilization without the state. These cosmopolitan connections, based on kinship, trade relationships, or shared ritual practices, preceded urban centers.
In this framework, early cities didn’t create civilization but rather compressed already-existing social norms and networks into smaller geographical spaces. If we understand cities this way, we can escape the misconception that large-scale organization requires government in the sense of people “bossing others around.” Throughout history, people have organized complex, large-scale cooperation through various bottom-up mechanisms—roads not taken in our current world.
This doesn’t mean hierarchy never emerged. Graeber and Wengrow acknowledge that monarchies, kings, and powerful leaders did arise and sometimes took over or grew within cities. However—and this is crucial—these top-down systems of domination more commonly arose outside urban centers, often on their margins in what they call “heroic societies.” Hierarchy wasn’t a consequence of cities but often developed in peripheral areas.
The Structural Similarity of Kings and Slaves
One of the most provocative arguments concerns the relationship between kingship and slavery. Graeber and Wengrow argue that kings and enslaved people are structurally similar: both exist outside normal kinship networks. Kings are placed “above” family obligations, subject to no law but their own will. Enslaved people are forcibly removed from kinship, denied the ability to form recognized relationships and obligations.
Both positions represent extremes of the power spectrum—absolute domination and absolute vulnerability—but both involve the same fundamental separation from the reciprocal obligations that structure most human societies. This insight connects to their broader argument about how arbitrary power emerges.
Franz Steiner and the Erosion of Hospitality
To explore the origins of arbitrary power, Graeber and Wengrow introduce Franz Steiner, an influential but relatively unknown Bohemian anthropologist who died tragically young. Steiner’s parents perished in the Holocaust, and he spent years as a refugee before settling in England. His personal experience of displacement informed his theoretical work on what he called “pre-servile institutions”—social arrangements that existed before formal slavery but created the conditions for it.
Steiner’s key insight concerned the erosion of hospitality norms. In many societies, obligations to shelter refugees and asylum-seekers were strong moral imperatives, part of the “hospitality zones” that constituted civilization. But as these norms weakened, vulnerable people—widows, orphans, refugees, the disabled—became available for capture by royal courts. Kings presented themselves as “defenders of widows and orphans,” offering charity and protection, but this apparent generosity became a mechanism for accumulating dependents who could be converted into servants, slaves, or enforcers of royal power.
This suggests that arbitrary power doesn’t emerge from cities or complexity per se, but from the transformation of social obligations. What begins as charity and protection can become domination when reciprocal relationships are severed. The roads not taken involved maintaining those reciprocal structures.
The Feminist Anthropological Insight
Near the conclusion, Graeber and Wengrow acknowledge that “we should have listened to the feminist anthropologists all along.” Feminist scholars have long documented a connection between external male violence (warfare, raiding) and the degradation of women’s status within communities. When societies organize around masculine martial prowess directed outward, gender relations at home tend to become more hierarchical and oppressive.
This observation appears briefly, suggesting it might have been explored more fully in a sequel. The recognition points toward broader questions about how different forms of violence and domination connect—how the capacity to exercise force against outsiders relates to internal social relationships.
Roads Not Taken
Why study ancient societies and pre-servile institutions? Not to trace an evolutionary path to the present or to project our contemporary forms backward, but to understand roads not taken—to recognize what could have been. People actually lived under radically different social arrangements, not for brief experimental moments but for centuries, even millennia.
Graeber and Wengrow suggest this realization may be more tragic than traditional “fall from grace” narratives. We could have been living under fundamentally different conceptions of what human society is about. It also addresses the loss of social imagination they traced in the conclusion’s first half—recovering awareness of roads not taken is the first step toward imagining new ones.
However, this recognition also liberates: if people organized themselves differently for extended periods, then “the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.” Alternative futures remain available.
The book closes by invoking the Greek concept of kairos—those rare moments when a society’s frames of reference undergo fundamental shifts. Graeber and Wengrow believe we are cascading toward such a moment, when thinking differently about the past enables thinking differently about future possibilities. The roads not taken haven’t disappeared. They’re waiting to be rediscovered.
Assessing the Conclusion
This conclusion crystallizes the book’s central project: demonstrating that hierarchy, inequality, and domination are not inevitable consequences of scale or complexity, but historical choices with specific origins. By showing that people organized complex societies in diverse ways for millennia, Graeber and Wengrow argue against deterministic narratives that naturalize contemporary arrangements.
Several aspects deserve critical attention. First, the conclusion raises important questions—particularly about gender, violence, and the origins of patriarchy—that receive insufficient treatment. The brief acknowledgment of feminist anthropological insights suggests productive directions for further research. Second, while they effectively challenge the scale-determines-hierarchy assumption, questions remain about what factors do make certain organizational forms more likely in particular contexts. Third, the concept of “roads not taken” is evocative but requires careful historical thinking: Why were certain possibilities abandoned? What made some arrangements more vulnerable to displacement than others?
For students engaging with this material, the conclusion offers a model of how to address widespread misconceptions without getting lost in minor scholarly debates. It also demonstrates how reconceiving the past opens space for imagining different futures—a fundamentally hopeful project in an era often dominated by narratives of inevitability. The roads not taken are also roads that might still be found.