Escaping the Hobbes vs. Rousseau Trap: Why Both Lead to Inevitable Hierarchy
Reading the first part of chapter 1, “Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood” in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a 2021 book by David Graeber and David Wengrow, this lecture explores the Hobbes vs Rousseau trap:
These materials were for a History of Humanity course. Next: Finished chapter one.
The Classic Debate: Are People Good or Bad?
For centuries, Western political philosophy has been trapped in a debate about human nature:
Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651): People in a “state of nature” are fundamentally bad. Without government to control them, life is “nasty, brutish, and short”—a war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes). We need a strong state, police, and hierarchy to keep people in line and make them civilized.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on Inequality, 1755): People in their natural state were fundamentally good—living in harmony, equality, and freedom. But civilization, private property, and agriculture corrupted this natural goodness. Inequality is lamentable but perhaps inevitable given modern conditions.
Anthropology emerged as a discipline partly to answer this debate empirically—to actually look at societies without state governments rather than just philosophize about them.
Anthropology’s Answer: Rousseau Was Right (Mostly)
From the 1960s onward, influential anthropological work suggested Rousseau had it more correct than Hobbes. Richard Lee’s studies of the Kalahari hunters-gatherers (often called “!Kung” or “San”) showed:
- Life wasn’t “nasty, brutish, and short”—people lived relatively long, healthy lives
- Work requirements were 10-15 hours per week, not constant toil
- People had more leisure time than modern workers
- Societies were relatively egalitarian, without rigid hierarchies
- Violence was rare; the “war of all against all” didn’t exist
This research supported the idea that humans in their “natural state” (before agriculture and states) lived in relatively peaceful, egalitarian bands. The 1966 “Man the Hunter” conference (later revised to acknowledge women’s gathering as equally important) established this view.
But Then Comes Jared Diamond: “Your Dream is Unrealistic”
Jared Diamond—ornithologist turned popular anthropology writer—published influential works arguing that while Rousseau might have been right about the past, we can’t return to it. His 1987 article “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” argued agriculture was humanity’s downfall. His 2012 book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? essentially concluded: not much. (For a direct anthropological response to Diamond’s determinism, see the Guns, Germs, and Steel critique.)
Diamond’s position, as Graeber and Wengrow note, becomes: “Alas, for all you anarchists who dream of living without state government—your dream is unrealistic” (page 11). Why? Because:
- Traditional egalitarian societies only worked at small population scales
- To have large societies with cities, infrastructure, and modern amenities, you need hierarchy
- You can’t eliminate 99% of humanity to return to hunter-gatherer population densities
- We need state governments to coordinate large societies
So even if people were good in nature, we’re stuck with hierarchy because we want sidewalks, Coca-Cola, and all the comforts of civilization.
The Trap: Both Positions End at Hierarchy
Here’s what Graeber and Wengrow want us to see: Whether you start with Hobbes or Rousseau, you end up at the same place—hierarchy is inevitable.
Hobbes route: People are bad → need strong state to prevent chaos → hierarchy necessary for civilization
Rousseau/Diamond route: People were good in small-scale societies → but we can’t return to that → need state hierarchy for large-scale civilization
Both narratives foreclose the possibility of imagining alternatives. If hierarchy is inevitable—either because people are naturally bad or because large societies require it—why even try to imagine more egalitarian arrangements?
This is determinism disguised as different philosophical positions. Both routes lead to: “Sure, inequality is unfortunate, but we can’t do much about it. Maybe tinker with tax rates, fund more sidewalks, improve healthcare—but no fundamental political alternatives are possible.”
Graeber & Wengrow’s Intervention: Escape the Binary
The first move in The Dawn of Everything is to reject this entire framework. They argue:
1. New archaeological and anthropological evidence updates what we thought we knew
- Hunter-gatherers weren’t all the same—they had “bold social experiments”
- Some created seasonal cities, gathering in huge numbers then dispersing
- Others had complex hierarchies in winter that dissolved in summer
- There was no single “natural state”—just diverse experiments with social organization
2. Early agriculture didn’t automatically create hierarchy
- The first farmers appeared ~10,000 years before states emerged
- Early farming could be egalitarian, seasonal, and flexible
- It wasn’t an automatic “downfall” from egalitarian hunting to hierarchical civilization
3. Indigenous intellectuals critiqued European society and influenced Enlightenment thought
- Rousseau and others weren’t just inventing thought experiments
- They were responding to Indigenous critiques of European hierarchy—the subject of chapter 2
- We need to take these non-European political philosophers seriously
Why This Matters: History as Catalog, Not Theology
If most of human history is “irreparably lost” (page 1), why study it at all?
Not as a theological exercise about whether humans are inherently good or evil—that question comes from our own society’s concepts and doesn’t make sense for “fish or elephants.”
Instead, view history as a catalog of experiments—all the different ways humans have organized themselves. Some experiments with freedom and equality. Some with hierarchy and control. Some alternating by season. Some we might find inspiring. Some horrifying. But all showing that social arrangements are choices, not evolutionary inevitabilities.
This reframing is crucial for challenging determinism. If humans have always experimented with different social arrangements—if we’re neither trapped in Hobbesian chaos nor exiled from Rousseauian paradise—then we can imagine and create different arrangements in our own future.
The Stakes: Breaking Free from Inevitability
The Hobbes vs. Rousseau debate isn’t just academic philosophy. It shapes how we think about:
- Whether inequality is natural or socially constructed
- Whether we need more police or different social arrangements
- Whether large-scale cooperation requires hierarchy
- Whether alternatives to current systems are “realistic” or utopian fantasies
When Diamond declares that dreams of living without state government are “unrealistic,” he’s not making an empirical claim—he’s foreclosing imagination. If both sides of the classic debate lead to “hierarchy is inevitable,” then the debate itself serves determinism.
Graeber and Wengrow offer an escape route: Look at what humans have actually done throughout history. Not to find a paradise to return to, but to expand what we can imagine as possible.
Course Context
This lecture is from History of Humanity 2023, examining The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Next: Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood (finishing chapter 1).