But for us, the key point to remember is that we are not talking here about ‘freedom’ as an abstract ideal or formal principle (as in ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!’). Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.
What we can now see is that the first two freedoms – to relocate, and to disobey commands – often acted as a kind of scaffolding for the third, more creative one. Let us clarify some of the ways in which this ‘propping-up’ of the third freedom actually worked. As long as the first two freedoms were taken for granted, as they were in many North American societies when Europeans first encountered them, the only kings that could exist were always, in the last resort, play kings. If they overstepped the line, their erstwhile subjects could always ignore them or move someplace else. The same would go for any other hierarchy of offices or system of authority. Similarly, a police force that operated for only three months of the year, and whose membership rotated annually, was in a certain sense a play police force – which makes it slightly less bizarre that their members were sometimes recruited directly from the ranks of ritual clowns.
It’s clear that something about human societies really has changed here, and quite profoundly. The three basic freedoms have gradually receded, to the point where a majority of people living today can barely comprehend what it might be like to live in a social order based on them.--David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021) The Dawn of Everything, p. 503.
After live-tweeting my impressions of each chapter (see here for links) of The Dawn of Everything, I wasn't sure if I wanted to blog about it. But the last few weeks the book has been popping up in various Digressions. So, it's time to confront it more directly. And since I have actually not seen yet a substantive discussion of their account of freedom (a topic I also have modest amount of expertise), I thought I start there. My treatment is mostly expository, but I will share a few reservations along the way.
The quoted passage is from the conclusion and actually nicely reveals some key features of the (anarchist) political philosophy that is immanent in the work. Just so that you don't think I am cherry-picking, earlier in the book, they called these "the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships." (p. 426)
The first freedom -- (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings -- is familiar as exit. (It is bit strange that it is not discussed in the terms made familiar by Albert Hirschman in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty back in the early 1970s.)+ Crucially in The Dawn of Everything, when this freedom is discussed, it is in the context of the social infrastructure that makes it possible. An especially memorable treatment is the way in which people can wander in and out of tribes and societies over enormous distances in turtle island (North America). I quote their own summary:
It would seem, then, that kinship in such cases is really a kind of metaphor for social attachments, in much the same way we’d say ‘all men are brothers’ when trying to express internationalism (even if we can’t stand our actual brother and haven’t spoken to him for years). What’s more, the shared metaphor often extended over very long distances, as we’ve seen with the way that Turtle or Bear clans once existed across North America, or moiety systems across Australia. This made it a relatively simple matter for anyone disenchanted with their immediate biological kin to travel very long distances and still find a welcome. (p. 280)
What this shows is that the kind of political/social exit they are interested in requires a pre-existing social infrastructure (a scaffolding in their terms) to allow people to enter somewhere else. And this infrastructure (in this case the Turtle and Bear clans) functions orthogonally to the political units that people are exiting from and entering into. If I understand the larger argument of the book correctly this infrastructure is partially the effect of myths and narratives that generate collective teaching on important political events of the past. (I say partially because other practices must sustain the infrastructure.)
In fact, one of the neatest elements on the book is how often what I would like to call longue durée memory is salient. (See, especially, their treatment of Teotilihuacan in chapter 9 and Cahokia in chapter 11.) Their longue durée can be centuries long! The politically salient memory is often encoded in myths and shared narratives as a reservoir for important political choices. This is one way in which (1) enters into (3).
In this sense, Graeber and Wengrow contribute to the overcoming of what I once called (recall) two classical conceptions of myth: first, myth is associated with superstition and something to be overcome by modernity and rationalization. On this view, which takes myth seriously as the necessary stepping stone toward a political or ethical decision that removes us from the state of myth. The other, second, classical conception is that myth just is the stuff of everydayness, an ordinary comportment or way of being in the world. But as they show myth can also be constitutive of debates involving rational political choice. And those of us trained in the classical conceptions of myth have to unlearn our biases against myth. As regular readers know I came to the view through my encounter with Aaron Tugendhaft's beautiful (2017) Baal and the Politics of Poetry,* which nicely complements their chapters 7-8.*
But to have a shared myth and to share in social infrastructure orthogonal to political units means one shares significant features of (ahh) a culture. So, one does not get this kind of exit -- Neil Levy alerted me to this -- simply. Admittedly this is a feature not a bug of their approach. Today, too many states are creating lots of severe obstacles to entry and exit. (Strikingly more than in, say, the nineteenth century.)
Before I move on to the second freedom, it is worth noting that some of the most interesting features of the book for political philosophy are the way these collective choices are themselves effects of a process of large scale cultural schismogenesis; that is, the tendency of whole peoples to define themselves against each other. And while I was sad they ignored all the modern political science literature on polarization, I thought their examples truly fascinating and will discuss them again in the future (see also below).
The second freedom (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others -- is rather important to the anarchic project of The Dawn of Everything. It is also really a breath of fresh air. For, one annoying feature of the scholarly debate within political philosophy (about liberal democracies) is that many bread and butter journal articles basically involve arguments about what and when states and their officers may legitimately compel their citizens (and even more their non-citizens). The impulse behind these articles is basically noble -- they always involve arguments that conclude considerable limitations on what folk can be compelled to do --, but I have to admit these discussions prevented me from self-identifying as a political philosopher for a long time. It basically turns our devotion to our disciplinary projects as ahh the nicest functionary of the modern state. (This is also visible in discussions on civil disobedience and immigration.)
The second freedom is really incompatible with statehood. Even the freest modern states compel lots of actions (not just taxation), and raise enormous costs to even relatively trivial disobedience. Much of this is completely internalized by their citizens. In part because they thereby solve endless coordination problems and avoid unpleasant friction with their neighbors. The small number of commands that are politicized and matters of controversy should not obscure these facts. That is to say, while I think (public) opinion is far more important in such matters than Graeber and Wengrow allow, one should not ignore the violent underpinnings (including the many small fines) of the system.
It's pretty clear from The Dawn of Everything that in societies in which one may ignore commands, there are fewer of them and that they involve considerable pre-existing discussion. But these come at a cost they themselves note (about all kinds of local governments), "resolving such inequities might require many hours, possibly days of tedious discussion, but almost always a solution will be arrived at that no one finds entirely unfair." (p. 426) As I noted yesterday (recall here; which includes a section on their book, but is not presupposed here), societies in which the division of labor is advanced tend to avoid this approach. And, in reasonably well functioning liberal societies, the right and luxury to ignore politics are one of its great blessings. Of course, this comes at the price of bureaucracy.
Throughout The Dawn of Everything, there is a polemic against bureaucracy. I don't think they ever have a nice thing to say about it, and they often say bad things about it. And this is because at bottom they see it as a species of "domination" grounded in "knowledge," and buttressed by a domination based on (state) "violence." Interestingly enough, the word 'impartial' or its cognates never appears in the book! So, what fairness (decoupled from norms of impartiality) means for Graeber and Wengrow always involves some kind of local, particular judgment. In most contexts I myself prefer impartiality over particular judgment, but since bureaucracies are themselves shaped by unequal background conditions, I can understand why others might demur.
The third freedom -- (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones -- is a collective one. For those who are entirely unfamiliar with the book (and the discussion about it), the book is full of examples in which whole societies switch major social organization (often seasonally). As I noted on Twitter, such collective switching when it really matters (so not traditions of carnival) are familiar to early twentieth century Europeans, who switched dramatically between collective mobilization and peace-time economies.
But the more important point is that for Graeber and Wengrow this third freedom also involves the collective rejection of the trappings of statehood (and its violence and hierarchy) altogether by particular groups. For readers of the Hebrew Bible this is not unfamiliar because the early narrative is (as Yoram Hazony notes in The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture), all about shepherds trying to avoid empire a theme discussed with scientific rigor in James C. Scott works. But they add huge number of examples, and -- most interestingly -- also point to large urban settlements as examples.
In fact, their understanding of such collective freedom to shape new social realities often comes close to what we political theorists call, republican features of self-governance familiar from (ahh) Rousseau and Machiavelli. (Rousseau's Discourses on Inequality is mentioned a lot to motivate the discussion (about that some other time perhaps), but The Social Contract isn't at all.) In fact, as the book proceeds popular assemblies are mentioned with greater frequency and as a positive alternative to democracy as understood in modern representative/elected democracies. A key passage is this one: "Yet democracy, in modern states, is conceived very differently to, say, the workings of an assembly in an ancient city, which collectively deliberated on common problems. Rather, democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlooker." (p. 367)
They go on to explain that the 'larger-than-life' individuals are modeled on the (anti-urban) aristocratic values. They present this as wholly original, and indeed their discussion is fresh. But the eighteenth century scholar in me is amused; in my introductory lecture courses on the history of political theory, I always make a big deal about the contrast between direct and indirect democracy, and I always add for good measure that what we would call 'democracy' would have have been called 'aristocratic' by the Greek ancients (sometimes mentioning Madison in passing). [Update: on twitter David Wengrow pointed out, correctly, that on p. 311-312, they credit the idea to Munro Chadwick and their "contribution is to trace the opposition back to the very origin of cities (and aristocracies) in the fourth millennium BC." My presentation misrepresents their view here, and so I am happy to correct it.]
Kidding aside, the significance of the quote from p 367 is that it kind of offers a window into the ways they view assemblies which oddly sound like Habermasian affairs and -- while I enormously respect Graeber and Wengrow -- is wholly at odds with what we know about most documented urban assemblies from literary sources not just in the ancient world but also medieval European world (or the New England town hall). They rightly reject the idea that we should treat reports of indigenous assemblies as plagiarisms from Livy. But it is worth reading Livy (amongst others), who is (for all of his inventions) a pretty useful source on the ways in which assemblies are turbulent and raucous affairs. And even when calm, often such assemblies are dominated by a few figures (often aristocratic in some pertinent local sense) in which many others have a much smaller role to play. In fact, their own (again fascinating) treatment of the decision by the Ayuntamiento (city council) of Tlaxcala to ally itself with Cortés fits this pattern.
I don't mean to deny that sometimes assemblies can avoid results that involve winners and losers, but that's true of representative parliaments. To put the point conceptually, assemblies and parliaments are mechanisms for collective decision-making and they both have features that promote ways to avoid zero-sum outcomes, but they also have features that generate it. (For example, in popular assemblies without secret ballot, it is very difficult to stand against 'the consensus.') That is to say, I was not at all convinced they have started to offer a compelling argument here. What they have done, and this is no mean feat, is to sketch the anarchist position in lively and appealing colors (see Justin Smith's essay on the book). But they do not offer a sober comparative analysis.
The previous paragraphs may hide what's crucial here. The freedom to shape entirely new social realities is not itself incompatible with liberal democracy (as I already remarked above with the terrifying example of the world wars). To illustrate this I quote an anecdote apparently due to Élie Halévy, but which I read in Ortega y Gasset. I use this anecdote because thanks to BLM the topic is highly salient again, and in their terms the adoption of a real police force is a major disaster for a community (see the quote at the top of this post). I use Ortega y Gasset because he is an elitist liberal (I have not edited away his class biases), and so far removed from Graeber and Wengrow. Since at the time France and England were great rivals, I think the anecdote also illustrates their notion of schismogenesis:
It might be well to take advantage of our touching on this matter to observe the different reaction to a public need manifested by different types of society. When, about 1800, the new industry began to create a type of man- the industrial worker-more criminally inclined than traditional types, France hastened to create a numerous police force. Towards 1810 there occurs in England, for the same reasons, an increase in criminality, and the English suddenly realise that they have no police. The Conservatives are in power. What will they do? Will they establish a police force? Nothing of the kind. They prefer to put up with crime, as well as they can. "People are content to let disorder alone, considering it the price they pay for liberty." "In Paris," writes John William Ward, "they have an admirable police force, but they pay dear for its advantages. I prefer to see, every three or four years, half a dozen people getting their throats cut in the Ratcliffe Road, than to have to submit to domiciliary visits, to spying, and to all the machinations of Fouche." Here we have two opposite ideas of the State. The Englishman demands that the State should have limits set to it.--The Revolt of the Masses, 123-124.
What is worth reflecting on, in light of their book, is why such large scale social decisions seem so rare in liberal democracy. And this is connected to what they describe in terms of the question "How did we get stuck?" That's actually a very important question for political philosophy. To be continued.
+Some of Hirschman is cited in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, including his collection, Rival views of market society and other recent essays, which has a good treatment of 'exit.'
*See also my own work on what I call philosophical prophecy.
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