Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!

by Fredy Perlman

Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! is a 1983 book by Fredy Perlman, for which he is best known. It is a personal critical perspective on contemporary civilization and society. The work defined anarcho-primitivism for the first time, and was a major source of inspiration for anti-civilization perspectives in contemporary anarchism, most notably on the thought of philosopher John Zerzan. In 2006 the book was translated into French under the title Contre le Léviathan, contre sa légende and into Turkish as Er-Tarih’e Karşı, Leviathan’a Karşı.

Genres: History, Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Anarchism, Anthropology, Religion

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Fredy Perlman (August 20, 1934 – July 26, 1985) was an author and publisher. His most popular work, the book Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, is a major source of inspiration for anti-civilisation perspectives in contemporary anarchism.

Perlman was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He emigrated with parents to Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1938 just ahead of the Nazi takeover. The Perlman family came to the United States in 1945 and finally settled in Lakeside Park, Kentucky.

In 1952 he attended Morehead State College in Kentucky and then UCLA from 1953-55. Perlman was on the staff of The Daily Bruin, the school newspaper, when the university administration changed the constitution of the newspaper to forbid it from nominating its own editors, as the custom had been. Perlman left the newspaper staff at that time and, with four others, proceeded to publish an independent paper, The Observer, which they handed out on a public sidewalk at the campus bus stop, since they were forbidden by the administration to distribute in on the campus.

In 1956-59 he attended Columbia University, where he met his life-long companion, Lorraine Nybakken. He enrolled as a student of English literature but soon concentrated his efforts in philosophy, political science and European literature. One particularly influential teacher for him at this time was C. Wright Mills.

In late 1959, Perlman and his wife took a cross-country motor scooter trip, mostly on two-lane highways traveling at 25 miles per hour. From 1959 to 1963, they lived on the lower east side of Manhattan while Perlman worked on a statistical analysis of the world's resources with John Ricklefs. They participated in anti-bomb and pacifist activities with the Living Theatre and others. Perlman was arrested after a sit-down in Times Square in the fall of 1961. He became the printer for the Living Theatre and during that time wrote The New Freedom, Corporate Capitalism and a play, Plunder, which he published himself.

In 1963, the husband and wife left the U.S. and moved to Belgrade, Yugoslavia after living some months in Copenhagen and Paris. Perlman received a master's degree in economics and a PhD at the University of Belgrade's Law School; his dissertation was titled "Conditions for the Development of a Backward Region," which created an outrage among some members of the faculty. During his last year in Yugoslavia, he was a member of the Planning Institute for Kosovo and Metohija.

During 1966-69 the couple lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Perlman taught social science courses at Western Michigan University and created outrage among some members of the faculty when he had students run their own classes and grade themselves. During his first year in Kalamazoo, he and Milos Samardzija, one of his professors from Belgrade, translated Isaac Illych Rubin's Essay on Marx's Theory of Value. Perlman wrote an introduction to the book: "An Essay on Commodity Fetishism."

In May 1968, after lecturing for two weeks in Turin, Italy, Perlman went to Paris on the last train before rail traffic was shut down by some of the strikes that were sweeping Western Europe that season. He participated in the May unrest in Paris and worked at the Censier center with the Citroen factory committee. After returning to Kalamazoo in August, he collaborated with Roger Gregoire in writing Worker-Student Action Committees, May 68.

During his last year in Kalamazoo, Perlman had left the university and together with several other people, mostly students, inaugurated the Black and Red magazine, of which six issues appeared. Typing and layout was done at the Perlman house and the printing at the Radical Education Project in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In January 1969 Perlman completed The Reproduction of Daily Life. While traveling in Europe in the spring of 1969

Reviews

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is likely the only historical survey of western civilization that I'll ever read with genuine excitement and interest, and my most naive wish after reading it was that it could become a standard introductory text for students of world history.

It goes without saying that Perlman's essay is not "objective". In other words, it is no candidate for perpetuating the business of progress, which is the unspoken agenda of "objectivity". This account of His-Story is openly disparaging of the He's which constitute and write it as well as the Leviathans which they run. It is an account that is zealously life-affirmative. And it is written in conscious contrast to the libraries of historical literature that demean life and freedom by glorifying the abstract, artificial constructs of Progress, Civilization, and production.

Some readers might find the author's linguistic liberties and central analogy peculiar, but they are critical devices for shifting the reader's perspective outside the historical narratives we're accustomed to learning. He uses "Levaithan" prominently as a synonym for the state and civilization and "zek" (actual slang from The Gulag Archipelago for inmates in Soviet labor camps) for worker, slave, or proletarian. The Leviathan is depicted visually as a monstrous mechanical worm and conceptually as Thomas Hobbes's formulation of the state as a head (the king) and a body (the citizens), all zeks--human beings incorporated into the beast.

Compared to the somber prose of Frederick W. Turner's equally critical Beyond Geography, Perlman's is straightforward yet full of passion. Turner's style suits his tragic work, while Perlman wrote what feels like an unfinished hero story, the hero, Ahura Mazda, the light, life, community, and freedom struggling against Ahriman, darkness, death, hatred, and enslavement. This history is no uninformed polemic; it is a thorough, exhaustive, informative polemic that spans from the origin of the species to the present, looking forward to the end of Leviathan and the return of the light.

Despite my wish, although it is as valid as any standard account, I know that this book or one like it could never be accepted as a valid account of history anywhere Leviathan functions, which, at present, is the whole planet. If this account of history became widely accepted, Leviathan would face its end.

Check out the first chapter here

[=====D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don’t be misled by the poetic and mythologizing tone with which Fredy Perlman renders his epic Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! This is an exhaustively researched book. It is also profoundly philosophical, asking questions and suggesting answers you won’t find anywhere else. The fact that it is beautifully written in an accessible manner is highly appropriate to its message, as you will see below. The book’s style is very much the opposite of dry scientific writing. I think if readers have difficulty with this book apart from getting a hold of it (it’s distributed mostly through its publisher, Black & Red), it is because there is virtually no precedent for the combination of style, depth, and content of Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! to this day. There are few works of any kind on the subject, but what few there are mostly take a (pseudo) scientific or essay approach. To my knowledge no one tackles the question of civilization with the background in philosophy, history, economics, anthropology, ethnography, Marxism, political science, etc. that Fredy does. The depth of this background knowledge may not be immediately obvious to the reader in part because of the pointedly un-scientific tone used throughout, but you could (and should, as I would argue) use Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! as an introductory text to a world history class.

Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! is the history of the world from the perspective of human beings and their communities. It may come as a surprise to some of you that this is very much the opposite of every other history book in existence, that all history books prior to this one were written as histories of institutions and the men (almost exclusively men) who supposedly set them in motion. The difference between these approaches is huge. On the one hand, we are looking at human beings and their concerns: life, freedom, joy, family, community. On the other hand we are concerned with machines and abstractions, undying entities which retool all existence in their image and relate to life only insofar as they need living beings to operate their cogs and levers because they are inanimate themselves.

Fredy Perlman asks the questions which end polite conversations and cause the questioner to be marked a pariah: if civilization is as wonderful as we are told, why did it have to be imposed on each new group of people at gunpoint? Shouldn’t its merits be obvious, the material standard of living and so forth? Why did the colonizers of the Americas complain that they can’t keep their citizens from running off to join the “savage” tribes, whereas the natives themselves could only be coerced to adopt “civilized” life, and would still revert to “savagery” given half a chance? What is it about the civilized that enabled them to conquer the world? What is it that makes them want to? And where did civilization come from in the first place?

Why against civilization? Why not against capitalists, communists, fascists, Illuminati, Masons, Republicans, Americans, colonialists, warmongers, or just plain assholes? Why not against greed or hubris? There have been many attempts to correct the injustices inherent in all civilized societies. Many people thought that if only their ideology could be given free reign everything would be fine. Every attempt so far failed; none have succeeded in returning to mankind a standard of living enjoyed by our hunter and gatherer ancestors, materially, and more importantly spiritually and psychologically. Studying history reveals that some things are not as new as they appear to us, cut off by our own literacy and technology in time. Consider the following story:

“The leader of a certain city is disturbed by the state of his people. He sees that society is two-tiered, the few rich and the many poor, and that the poor are in dire straits and have little hope for improvement. He remembers, or thinks he remembers, a time when things weren’t this way, when everyone had a fighting chance to live happily. He institutes reforms intended to fix the injustices. He decrees that “the youth was not required to work in the (rich man’s fields); the workingman was not forced to beg for his bread. The priest no longer invaded the garden of a humble person.” If a rich man wanted the healthy donkey of his servant, he had to pay the servant’s asking price in silver, and if the servant refused to sell, he couldn’t coerce him. And so on.

The reforms make the poor of his city happy, but seriously piss off the rich. The upper classes conspire to overthrow the reformer and help a ruler more sympathetic to their interests replace him.”

These events took place in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash around 2300 BC. They are recorded in a cuneiform script on a clay tablet. It is a completely modern story. In fact, Urukagina, the reforming ruler of Lagash, speaks of the injustices in his city as already ancient, though he knows they’re wrong. Lugalzagisi, the champion of the rich installed in his place, knows as well as any modern politician where his bread and butter lies. The lesson seems to be that those in possession of wealth and power will tenaciously cling to it. The Sumerians are not yet concerned with dressing up the injustices in their midst with ideologies like “trickle down economics.” But the reformers among them err in the same way as reformers will err until the present day: they assume that tinkering with the relative distribution of power and wealth is enough. Perhaps they themselves are heavily invested in the inequality, or maybe they have already forgotten what life outside of the Leviathan looks like. Or they may remember perfectly well what it is they have traded for civilization, but view the loss as already irremediable.

By the time of Urukagina, Sumerians were the inheritors of over 3000 years of increasing social stratification, large scale public works, strongmen, wars, and rapacious commerce. The first irrigation canals in the Near East were created in 6000 BC. Jericho in near-by Levant had 12 foot high walls around 8300 BC. Their world was cosmopolitan: merchants traveled ancient trade routes as far as the Indus Valley to the southeast, the Pontic Steppe (present day eastern Ukraine and southern Russia) to the northeast, Anatolia (Turkey) to the northwest, Egypt and Ethiopia to the southwest. Sumer would not have struck people from our time as incomprehensible. The concerns of a Sumerian were pretty much identical to those of a modern person: sex, stuff, status, work, rest. God(s). But both Sumer and 21st century life would be completely inconceivable to free human beings, those living outside of civilization.

During the period between the adoption of agriculture and animal husbandry around 10000 BC and the beginning of recorded history in around 2500 BC, mankind went through the greatest change it ever has and possibly ever will. For those who went through it, it is no exaggeration to say this was a change from being free human beings to inmates of a compulsory labor camp. For those able to temporarily escape the monster’s jaws through flight, life was also permanently changed for the worse. They would have to continue running with every advance of this or that Leviathan, this or that civilization, until nowhere remained to run and just one Leviathan is spread over the whole world. When Francis Fukuyama will announce its final victory in 1990, he will know it as democracy or capitalism.

The few handfuls of humans who still live in what we call a “state of nature” do so today only by the grace or absent-mindedness of the civilized. A much greater number exist in a semi-free state on the margins of society, wherever they can, overlooked for the time being. These groups span the gamut from greater to lesser amounts of freedom, but none of them can be completely free because none have the security necessary to experience complete freedom. For the rest of us, the very meaning of the word freedom is inverted.

Insist that “freedom” and “the state of nature” are synonyms, and the cadavers will try to bite you. The tame, the domesticated, try to monopolize the word freedom; they’d like to apply it to their own condition. They apply the word “wild” to the free. But it is another public secret that the tame, the domesticated, occasionally become wild but are never free so long as they remain in their pens. p.7

Instead of being free to develop our humanity to its fullest potential, a process heavily intertwined with the lore and traditions of our communities, we are “free” to create a personal identity based on the kinds of objects and experiences we can afford, largely in seclusion. Naturally, this modern kind of freedom leads to suffering and confusion.

The state of nature is a community of freedoms.

Such was the environment of the first human communities, and such it remained for thousands of generations.

Modern anthropologists who carry Gulag in their brains reduce such human communities to the motions that look most like work, and give the name Gatherers to people who pick and sometimes store their favorite foods. A bank clerk would call such communities Savings Banks!

The zeks on a coffee plantation in Guatemala are Gatherers, and the anthropologist is a Savings Bank. Their free ancestors had more important things to do. pp.7-8

So what is it we the civilized are missing?

Where does one start? The short answer is, everything.

Even during the coldest winter days, when the branches of evergreens sagged from their weight of snow, the human child was born into a very warm context. The warmth did not come from the walls of the bark lodge, which failed to block all draughts, nor from the fire on the floor, but from the radiant people welcoming the newcomer.

The child was expected; she was already an important personage; her arrival completed the community. Soon after her birth, she was ceremonially named, not arbitrarily but very carefully. The Totem, namely the community of the newcomer’s kin, possessed a number of names, as the sky possesses a number of stars, and the community was not quite whole, was in fact uneasy, if the names were not carried by living individuals. Everyone attended the naming ceremony because all were enhanced by the newly-named. The names did not run out. The Potawatomi were not committed to what we will know as Population Growth, and it is said that they did not experience the phenomenon.

The newcomer provided a missing rhythm. The name expressed the community’s embrace of the missing rhythm and also some expectations about the music that might be heard.

But the specific rhythm of the newly-named could be foretold no more than the final shape of a tree can be foretold from a seedling. The child was placed in no school to stunt her growth to the expected size and shape. On the contrary, the girl-child as well as her newborn brother were left free to emulate, or ignore, uncles and aunts, cousins among the animals, everyone and everything under the Sun, not excluding the Sun.

The grownups watched, not to close doors, but to open doors, to let the children wander where they would unharmed.

By the time the Potawatomi children were old enough to have expectations of their own, they were prepared to be their own guides. Dream lodges were set up in the forest, one for the girl, another for her brother. The youngsters fasted until a Totem spirit visited them. The spirit usually appeared in the form of an animal, and was usually not the same spirit whose name the child wore. The spirit promised to guide the child along a specific path, namely to give the child an individual rhythm, and the spirit offered the child certain powers with which to achieve the rhythm, powers with which to light the path.

Henceforth the children were on their own, bound neither by laws nor by the community’s expectations. Their own dream spirit helped them decide whether or not to live up to the ancestor whose name they carried. If they decided not to, they would be renamed after the first act that revealed the children were determined to follow distinct paths.

The boy, carrying his guide’s offerings in a beautifully adorned bag, and knowing that he could call on his guide simply by fasting, set out on his own to face a cosmos whose grandeur and mystery will be inaccessible to our imaginations. We will know something of his feats as a hunter or a warrior, as a long-distance walker, as a lover. We will know less of the depth of his friendships with kinsmen or strangers, and almost nothing of his friendships with wolves and bears whose tracks he followed, whose signals he tried to grasp, whose universe he tried to understand. And we will know nothing at all of his fasts on mountain tops or alongside green mirror-like tree-surrounded lakes, of the journeys he undertook with his guide across and through the water to the place of life’s origin, of his flights on the guide’s wings to the sunset land where his ancestors gathered.

We will know that he eventually returned to his Totem with meat and with numerous stories, and that he married his beloved’s sister because his beloved had in the meantime married a youth who had not stayed away for so long. We will know that he spoke of his exploits and his voyages to his children and also to his sister’s children, the nephew and niece whose dream lodges he built in the forest.

We will think that his strength left him when he gave up warring as well as hunting, when he became a peacemaker, storyteller and lone wanderer.

We will not know that he revisited a mountain top he had known in his youth, fasted until his guide came for him, flew to the land beyond the sunset, joined his beloved, he as youthful as on his first trip, she as beautiful as on the day he first saw her, and traveled with her alongside him across and through water to the place of Life’s beginnings.

If we knew all this, we wouldn’t ask why the man resisted encasing himself in our linear, visionless Order. Isn’t it our longing that expresses itself in a story about a European called Faust who turns his back on respectability, on the esteem of his colleagues, on law as well as religion, so as to have access to a personal guide and personal powers available to every Potawatomi?

The man’s older sister, in the meantime, created a music that will sound less ‘romantic’ to our ears. She too followed her own dream, but she found it possible to fulfill her own guide’s expectations as well as the community’s. She lived up to the Totem ancestor whose name she proudly continued to carry. She threw herself into the Totem’s activities, perhaps reacting against her lonesome brother; perhaps she, too, thought him excessively ‘romantic’.

Like her name-ancestor, she turned bark of birch trees into canoes and winter lodges and tree-sugar baskets; she turned the skins of animals into cloaks, skirts, moccasins and medicine bags. Her own spirit inspired the colorful quilled symbolism with which she finished everything she made.

Like her ancestor, she was one of the preparers of the ceremonial welcoming of spring’s new shoots, and after her marriage she was also a preparer of the ceremonial expulsion of Wiske, but the words she sang and the steps she danced were inspired by her own spirit.

Like her ancestor, she gathered herbs and became familiar with their general uses, but when her son was attacked by something he ate, she had to learn from her own spirit how to combine and administer the herbs while singing him back to health.

Her son as well as her daughter later took after her lonesome younger brother, but she was neither disappointed nor surprised; she knew that the children were following their own dreams, as she herself had.

Her dream had guided her to the center of the festivals and ceremonies, to the village council and the medicine lodge. Nothing her kin did or knew was alien to her.

Yet some of us will pretend to be honest when we ask why she was so vigorous in expelling Wiske from the ceremonial circle, why she would have been repelled by the prospect of becoming a housewife in a Civilized household, even the Archon’s.

Can we not recognize that in the fullness of development of universal human capacities she exposes the immiseration of the shamefully stunted products of Civilization? Can we not see that this Potawatomi matron who excels as Architect, Shoemaker, Shipbuilder, Furrier, Dramatist, Painter, Composer, Dancer, Druggist and Doctor already surpasses the many-sided Genius, the notoriously flexible Renaissance Man?

Shouldn’t the question be inverted? Shouldn’t we ask why we are fascinated by a Da Vinci, instead of asking why she is repelled? Is it because Da Vinci dangles from Leviathan’s neck like a cowbell, whereas she stands on ordinary dirt?

Why does a Da Vinci gleam for us among the beast’s innumerable cowbells? Is it because, after all the stunting and spirit-breaking that makes us Civilized, we still want to be what she was, but can no longer become even what he was, can only applaud what Leviathan becomes instead of us? pp.242-245

The idea that civilization is a good thing is, to most people, so true it is self evident and needs no proof. For most people born and raised inside of Leviathan, with no notion that there even is an outside, questioning civilization is among the hardest mental exertions. But as Fredy Perlman shows in this book, this wasn’t always the case. Once it came into being, civilization conquered or co-opted every group of people it came across, but it took a long time and the “progress” was far from uniform. From the very start, humans have resisted the supposed bounty of civilized life whenever they had the chance.

Much of Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! is concerned with tracing this history of resistance to civilization. People did not willingly trade their freedoms in the state of nature for the garb of a civilized worker and consumer. Such conversions mostly only take place once no other alternatives exist. The focal point of the resistance has shifted from those on the exterior of Leviathans in the beginning to those already inside it more recently, as less and less yet un-civilized space remained. It seems like the mountains are always the place where resistance is fiercest, from the first barbarians who descended on Uruk from the Zagros mountains to the unconquerable Pashtuns or Kurds of today.

In the past, the average person was “convinced” to become civilized at the point of a sword. Today, we are persuaded that we are the beneficiaries of the best, most advanced and satisfying way of living ever through more advanced mechanisms, but perhaps the biggest factor in favor of civilization these days is the fact that it has swallowed all alternatives to itself. Still, a staggering amount of work goes into convincing a completely captive audience that they should want the thing that is supposedly so wonderful it is self-evident.

Without a prompt re-evaluation of our beliefs and priorities, we are facing an impending disaster on a global scale. It’s bizarre to live in a country where reality has been completely discarded in favor of a fantastical narrative of heathen enemies at the gate and god-given rights to plunder and profit from everything in sight. This story may have been current for some nation somewhere 3000 years ago, but it’s hard to imagine it being anything other than self-serving even then. Now, when we desperately need to acknowledge our unique predicament as a potential scourge of all creation, the bullshit issuing from the loudest available channels is deafening and disorienting, which is likely exactly the effect it is supposed to have.

FULL review HERE

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is considered a "must read" by most anarcho-primitivists, and it's not hard to see why. Before you even open it up, it's got a very indie/anti-corporate/punk rock look to it. The writing itself is focused almost entirely on rebellion against authority. He also romanticizes indigenous cultures and oversimplifies the history, basically just telling his audience what they want to hear. The general theme isn't bad but even when I agree with his messages I feel like they're being presented in misleading ways. When he talks about the possible reasons why Native Americans were more successful at keeping "leviathan" at bay than the Eurasians were, he focuses on cultural issues. There actually are better explanations though, like the things Jared Diamond discusses in Guns, Germs and Steel: the advantage Eastern empires had in spreading east and west through similar climates and environments, as opposed to the north and south orientation in central America, as well as easier animals to domesticate and probably some other resource advantages as well. He makes it clear himself that "heathens" in Europe resisted civilization as long as they could. Those people had similar beliefs to Native American cultures so it doesn't really make much sense for him to come to that conclusion. The message is still okay, the idea that cultures can be designed to be more resistant to exploitation and to growing into leviathans themselves, but it's not presented very well. James C. Scott's work on that subject is a lot more interesting.

He tries cramming so much into this book that a lot of it reads more like a list. It actually gets pretty tedious. Yet it still feels kind of obscure and poetic rather than scholarly. I don't remember seeing a single date in the entire thing. When I first started reading it, I thought it might read more like a religious text, like he was trying to imagine how an elder of a future tribe of surviving humans would pass on the history through word of mouth, and in a way that people who've never seen a computer screen or modern textbook could understand, leaving out trivial details and focusing only on themes. Had he done that I might have actually liked it more than I did. It'd be interesting to think how the general understandings of the cosmos, evolution, ecology, human history, etc. could be somewhat preserved in a simplified story like that. If a new religion was designed by modern scientists, what would their warnings and commandments be? In my opinion, something like that would have worked better for this sort of flowery, metaphorical writing style.

It's understandable why so many radicals love this book. There really isn't much else out there for primitivists to choose from. The vast majority of environmental books, even pretty good ones, chicken out when they get to the conclusion, basically telling us to just vote democrat and buy solar panels. It's always a relief to find writers like Derrick Jensen, John Zerzan and Fredy Perlman, as flawed as they may be in their own ways, since they at least admit that the root of the problem is deeper than modern capitalism. A few years ago, I actually got sick of trying to find new books I could agree with and decided to try writing my own ( http://aproposalforprimitivism.blogsp... ). Even though Perlman is one of a small handful of truly primitivist writers, I still can't really give this a good review because it's so overly romanticized, full of questionable history and so lacking in useful solutions. It really bothers me that so many people spend their time reading stuff like this. And especially praising stuff like this! Since it does at least criticize the things that everyone else tends to glorify it's kind of hard to hate it but I honestly can't say that I recommend it either. There's just not much here that's actually useful.

[Aonarán · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd been told by a lot of close friends with good book tastes that I should definitely read this at some point, and had tried two or three times before but couldn't get past the first few pages (Perlman quotes yeats and blake and all these other poets, and try as I might throughout the years I've never really been able to understand most poetry). So I just skipped the first three pages worth of poems, and got into it pretty fast.

Perlman does get a little heavey into the-world-was-a-wonderful-utopia-before-civilzation talk every now and again and his willingness to get so far into the back-when-women-healers-were-in-charge-everything-was-perfect gets a little obnoxious from time to time too - not to mention surprising coming from someone so into situationist ideas, like the totality.

About 1/3 to 1/2 through the book it gets kind of repetitive and formulaic, but if you can make it to about half way when the vikings, frankish knights and muslim merchants are all twisted together, it gets pretty sweet.

This book also talked about some concepts in a way I'd never thought of before and was surprised by that. For example, Perlman talks about until Rome, most deity-based states actually believed in their gods, something I'm not 100% in agreement with, but the idea of it does make me think. He also says that until the Frankish Knights most Europeans were not interested in commerce, that exchanging surplus (commodities) was only really done in terms of pillaging and plundering - in the form of spoils - and that rulers may enslave people to the fields, but the thought of making them work hard enough to produce an abundance of something like cloth is something one would only do to one's enemies. I would just never think of history in those terms.

It really is an amazing step by step narrative of the birth and development of civilization, written back before this sort of story was so over-told and cliche. Perlman also does a wonderful job talking about some of the more complex situationist ideas in a real down to earth, understandable way.

[Pádraic]

An anti-history that reads like it's being told to you by some weird guy you met at a party, who won't stop talking until the sun rises, who speaks without taking a breath. How much of it actually gets into your head is unclear, but something has. Something has changed in how you look at the world and how we got here. In lieu of trying to talk about this any further, I'll just post the excerpt that convinced me to read it in the first place:

The final destruction of Carthage has no precedent in the Sumerian, Akkadian or even Assyrian past. The last independent Phoenician city is isolated, besieged, attacked, totally destroyed and then burned. Its inhabitants are scattered to the world’s four corners as slaves. Still not satisfied, the Romans flatten what buildings and walls remain standing, plow the ground and sow it with salt, so that neither a house nor a crop will ever rise where Carthage once stood, so that the very memory of the city’s existence will be erased.

The rest of the story is equally revolting. North Africa, Iberia, Gaul, Macedonia, Thrace, Anatolia, the Levant, all become Rome. The inhabitants are either killed or enslaved or transformed into killing machines. Small Leviathans as well as free communities are shattered. Ancient traditions are broken and forgotten. Human beings are killed or maimed.

Yet how many pages will be devoted to the greatness of Rome! And how many pages to the technological ingenuity of Rome’s war engines! Why not praise death itself? Death is an even greater killer than Rome. Is it the ornamented Greek palaces and monuments in the capital that make the brutality so reputable? If so, then to win such praise, Death need only hire Greek artists.

[Hank · Rating 1 out of 5]

i’d burn this book

[Laszlo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I get what Perlman was trying to do here, history is problematic, those who wrote it even more so, men, white men, bloodthirsty empire worshipping men most of the time who saw everything through the lense of the Leviathan i.e the state, the king, the leader. I also appreciate his poetic approach, as whimsical and confusing his prose can get he really does redeem it with some nice displays of lyricism that are welcome, as well as his subjective take on history deserves its praise for its playful, alternative, almost sci-fi, historiography that eschews the classical blunt, raw, scientific style of writing using what Perlman derides as ''positive evidence'' and takes a more winding, personal road.

I had a one up on the first 100 pages or so because i'm a history buff so the heavily crammed references to ancient people's like Assyrians or Chaldeans or Medes or places like Elam and Schythia were not that tough , though i can see scores of people ditching the book after the first pages just because of the overbearing way of unloading so much history of people's and events in such an erratic way, it's not like history is complicated as it is, Perlman's dreamy connections between people's and wild, almost comical, speculations (sth.sth. Marco Polo stealing ravioli from China) make for a sludgey labyrinth.

I feel like this was an opportunity missed that could have take another path than the infantile, rage filled diatribe about the horror of hierarchy, state, civilization and technology that this books is. What could have been a fresh, poetic take on approaching history, perhaps retelling from HER-story since Perlman brings up, and rightfully so, the male-centric historiography, becomes a sort of ranting, raving, bohemian outburst of fetishization of Mother Earth of indigenous people of pre-technological civilizations that honestly made me sick to my stomach. Potential was also lost in fusing the different fields of social sciences, poetry, history, biology and so on to retell the story of mankind in a critical but playful and redeeming way. Instead, Perlman jumps around from Yeats to Clastres to Solzhenytsin to Turner, with occasional name dropings of works or authors which moments vary from interesting to ''Excuse me?''.

I really tried to find more to suck from the marrow of this book but It's infantile in a way that's obnoxious and dreamy in a way that makes you get hit by a tram dreamy, not, getting lost in a neighbourhood you've never been in before because you day dreamed about life dreamy. Add to it it's anarcho-primtivist leanings, which, aside its relevant critiques of technology, agriculture etc. at this point is about as bankrupt as a serious ideological approach to organizing society as is Posadism's communist aliens.

More so, it's Perlman's flowery fetishization of pre-industrial and indigenous people, or those who lived outside of the confined of state-run societies that grind my gears, I can smell the bong water and psychedelic 10 hour mix playing in a loop with a Che Guevarra banner on the wall with shelfs packing travel guides to Bhutan and self-help books collections. Not to mention it's inherent saviour complex issues, is overall very problematic and disappointing.

Better off reading Murray Bookchin's 'Ecology of Freedom' or looking up anthropologists like James C. Scott or Pierre Clastres for more interesting and better founded approaches to what Perlman was trying to articulate.

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 2 out of 5]

You aren’t going to convince people like Fukuyama with this ranty screed. Jumping to conclusions as a way to show how the enemies of freedom — whatever that means — are also jumping to conclusions doesn’t impress me. Maybe in 1983 when this was written and we are on the brink of nuclear war because the greedheads were so ideological, maybe then but in the meantime I am sure there are better histories out there, more liberatory, more feminist, and definitely more accurate. I also have to say there were more than a few points where the book just bored me. The author thinks he is being so shocking! But again, I think in the intervening years the idea, for example, that Eurocentric worldviews are a cul de sac, that the colonized were the civilized people and the colonizers were barbaric, etc, etc, not so new... As for whether the peoples you meet in classic anthropological ethnographies are “in a state of nature” or live in “the Golden age” ... there are certainly more detailed and considered analyses for a variety of conclusions beyond the “noble savage” vs “nasty, brutish and short” crap we’ve been arguing back and forth for hundreds of years.

Frustrating. Frustrating to slog through 6000 years of bad news, and frustrating to get it all from the kind of guy one suspects is critical of any victory short of we all head into the woods and learn how to forage.

Yet at the same time he imagines that every new nationalist movement and every new religious movement and every peasant uprising is at least initially on the side of goodness and light — he actually references Zoroastrian names for goodness and light — and I find that a bit dangerous. I see where he’s coming from, but I also see how the alt-right and old school fascists could run with that idea in the wrong direction, even if the author makes it clear that these movements fail when they become Leviathans themselves. Couple that with his Worm and Octopus metaphors and it starts to feel on the edge of antisemitism or only a few degrees away from David Icke and InfoWars. Then he goes off for a few pages on Cohn, the author of books about Millenniarians and other similar uprisings, saying that Cohn is on the side of Leviathan and therefore sees all these uprisings as bad and their visionary leaders as crazy. Well, that’s not how I remember it. Cohn is conservative, sure, but I did think he was sympathetic to these movements in his treatment but he also points out their antisemitism and maybe pushed the idea that fascism has its roots in these same movements. “Against Leviathan” is too quick to dismiss those criticisms and accuses Cohn of making arguments he didn’t make, actually writing, ‘Cohn doesn’t have to say it, because it’s just understood...’ So again, that makes me uncomfortable. There were also references to things I know were hoaxes, like the Lenni Lenape having a written document detailing their journey over the ice bridge.

Claiming that a more scholarly approach is automatically siding with “worldeaters” is just a cop-out, man.

Despite all these things that I didn’t like, there were bits that I did enjoy. It’s like hanging out with a cranky old comrade who is incredibly well read, outspoken and prickly. That can be amusing in small doses.

[Victor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a frustrating work in so many ways. This is a work of impressive erudition and understanding regarding world history and civilization with a particularly strong focus on what laughingly used to be called "Western Civilization." Perlman has written an anarchist polemic, however, not a textbook or even a piece of critical theory, which is fine (I'm an anarchist and I agree with most of his perspectives throughout the essay), but the writing style is less stirring than navel gazing, is filled with somewhat pointless neologisms (even for the era in which it was written), and comes across as a weak attempt at Nietzsche's style in bad English translation more often than not. You should understand, I have a LOT of respect for the ideas in this book as well as for the author, who was a vital activist and publisher for more than a generation, and who published much better written work in his life. Saying this about his most famous work kinda hurts me if I'm being really open here, but it's as kind a public judgment I can express on this book.

This is often thought of as a foundational anarcho-primitivist text, which makes sense, as it's a essentially a long chronological list of the mistakes made in the name of progress from the beginning of his-story (told with a strong dose of Bachtofen-flavored matriarchal spin, filtered through an anti-civilization perspective) through the colonization of the Americas with a strong comparison throughout with the Original Affluent Society, Neolithic hunter-gatherer life. However, this historical perspective also doesn't push any sort of anarcho-primitive praxis in contemporary life like the work of John Zerzan or even Derrick Jensen, for which I, at least, am grateful, as while I agree with the historical and contemporary criticism usually brought by anarcho-primitivist writers, their solutions for the circumstances they so ably describe are generally unrealistic in my opinion. This book has, essentially, none of that and I like it more for its lack of such paper-wasting twaddle.

I also love the narrative of ancient and medieval history and Perlman's consistent focus on the most interesting and liberational movements throughout as well as how they often are recuperated by anti-liberational movements or cultures. There's little depth or individuation to Perlman's narrative of oppositional groups (though he does make a worthwhile effort) and in the earlier sections of the book he mainly focuses on building his narrative of civilizational development as a series of conceptual enclosures and physical exploitations to the overall benefit of the book. There's some iffy scholarship in here, too, mostly to do with Native American materials (anything Barry Fell touches is factually inaccurate no matter how entertaining it might be, y'all), but most of that's covered in other reviews here.

Really, the most disappointing part of reading this for me is that, for me, there's really nothing new here, though Perlman does manage to find and delineate patterns of belief amongst widely different groups that I'm already familiar with. That, combined with the writing style (particularly the annoying neologisms), makes the work as a whole pretty mediocre for me. However, as I was thinking about this review, I also realized that I'm not sure I'm aware of any one book that contains all or even most of the history found here in a single volume, which meant that my review stays at four stars. Despite its flaws, this is a good and worthwhile, if somewhat annoying, read.

[Derek · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was given “Against History…” by a friend and chose to embark on it as my Ludditic tendencies have been invigorated as of late. Perlman bookends his project with some surface level screeds against Marx and Engels’ racism via the stand-in of Henry David Morgan’s anthropology. In place of Marx’s notion of class, Perlman has “humans” and “zeks,” the latter a term unapologetically borrowed from the anti-Semite Solzhenitsyn used to derisively refer to the oppressed who just aren’t smart enough to drop out of society.

Though Perlman obviously doesn’t make any effort to cite sources (because the desire on the part of a reader to research further is a perverse thing in his eyes, and besides, all of the historians besides Perlman are surely just liars anyway), I did some admittedly surface-level digging into his theory of trans-Atlantic Phoenicians importing Baal-worship to the Americas and it seems like the archeological evidence he would have relied on is likely a civilizing forgery itself. Of course, any mistakes such as these Perlman would wish to be forgiven, as he fundamentally did not wish to be here anyway.

Out of curiosity, I read some of Perlman’s other essays, such as “The Beirut Progrom,” and I found them to be an underwhelming commentary on the time. The only consistent conviction Perlman holds seems to be misanthropy, and the only human activity he seems to see any value in is religious fervor. If you take the book as an anthropology of religion in particular, there are some bits of interest, and I will definitely say that this comes with less baggage than Zerzan or Kaczynski. It makes sense than an anarchist (and essentially idealist philosophy) would be more concerned with what goes on in people’s souls than the specifics of how a society is actually organized and for whom.

I was a bit surprised that he spent little more than a few paragraphs speculating on the “Bronze Age Collapse” as it really seems like it would have bolstered his argument. Taking the broad strokes of his descriptions, I can’t really say I’d wish to impeach them; his problem is with the thrust of his argument, ultimately in favor of the futility of all resistance to oppression throughout history. It’s interesting that as the anarchist tendency finds itself further removed from its revolutionary context in which it was birthed, its aspirations become so grand as to destroy society itself. Aims for Toynbee, ends up Spengler.

[Bart Everson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A radical history of civilization. Basically, he's against it. No spoiler, that: it's right there in the title. For what is history, as we usually think of it, as we're usually taught it, if not a patriarchal story of conquest and domination in service of empire building? This author makes the case that most everything we laughingly call "civilization" is in fact systematized oppression of humanity and ecological rape of Mother Earth.

It's bracing worldview, to say the least. I think it's just relatable enough that most people — those who aren't blinded by allegiances to nation-state or religion or ideology — would agree with the basic premise. Most people would agree, that is, if we stopped to question the fundamental premises of the society in which we live. Reading the book makes me realize just how rare it is to hear this perspective so consistently and unwaveringly spelled out, page after page, century after century.

This book is highly idiosyncratic, to say the least. It's unlike any history I've ever read. (That's because it's not a history, check the title!) The author starts in ancient Sumeria and takes us all the way to Marxist revolutionaries in the course of just 300 pages, as a more or less continuous narrative. He uses quirky terminology, employs unique metaphors, and never cites a single year. It's not an academic text per se, which I'm sure is a point of pride, but neither is it an easy read. (Personally I would have appreciated some chapter headings. An index would have been nice. How about a bibliography? Nope, there's not a single citation.) Nevertheless it's a very scholarly work, in the sense that Perlman is clearly well-read and possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of human history. More importantly, perhaps, he has heart. The text demonstrates great empathy for the human condition and respect for those who resist oppressive systems.

I found this book hugely compelling and affecting in a way that is difficult to overstate. It has truly transformed my understanding of the world. At the end, I find myself questioning so much of what I have held to be valuable about civilization. It's a lot to assimilate. I'm not even saying I buy it all, at least not just yet, but he makes a powerful case. I've got to ponder it a while longer.

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 5 out of 5]

This anthropological/historical breakdown of Leviathan (power, control) is unique and amazing. Anarchist writing at its best.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you want to understand the "splinter in your mind"---this is the red pill.

[k.]

an only intermittently useful story founded on some potentially ludicrous statements.

[clinamen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those books that completely changes the way you conceptualize things, in this case the narrative of western civilization and progress which completely pervades our understanding of ourselves and our time. Perlman moves in a linear fashion through western history, beginning with the Sumerians and finishing with the eradication of the last free peoples in the Americas. Throughout, the focus is on the development of the monstrous Leviathan, which Perlman figures for civilization (after Hobbes), briefly describing the wide variety of individuals and groups who assisted in its destructive march through time, only to be devoured by it. One of the most interesting points he makes is that civilization is not in a continual state of progress, contrary to the myths of history books. Rather he shows how it is continually decomposing, hampered both by continuous resistance and its own death-nature, only to be brought back to life by both domineering zealots and well-intentioned reformers. This aspect of continual decomposition was brilliantly addressed by Alejandro de Acosta in his essay "History As Decomposition", which appeared in the journal Attentat. My only complaint is that it requires a fair bit of research on the side for anyone without a strong knowledge of western history, as many groups and their leaders are described very briefly, or only mentioned in passing. It gets a bit dull in the middle section, when Frankish marauders, Vikings, Muslims, and the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire are continually warring, but quickly becomes engaging again once the first nation-states begin to appear and he moves into eras closer to our own. All in all, a scathing critique of the false narratives of history and a sobering picture of the wide variety of free peoples which became little more than gears in Leviathan. You will never see civilization the same way again after reading this.

[Scott · Rating 1 out of 5]

"And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."
--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Round about the three quarters mark, Fredy Perlman states that he's sick of writing this book and would rather be doing something else. I had a similar sensation reading it.

It's not that his ideas are bad or even wrong; instead it’s the contempt with which he seems to treat everything along the way. Those within states are slaves or “zeks”, those without are noble savages and helpless victims. Historians are liars and anthropologists are racists. Citations and facts are tools of the oppressors.

In rejecting historians he falls into their worst traps: the books is pretty standard european history, even devolving to tedious lists of kings. Although he stops to tell us --not show, not demonstrate, tell-- that so and so and their state is bad, it’s still great man history.

His rejection of archaeology and anthropology is both unfair and damaging. By the 80s anthropology had been rejecting the very concept of civilization and barbarism for a couple decades. Certainly anthropology gives us a window into the “free people” whom Perlman so esteems that he almost completely ignores.

In the 2000s another anarchist, David Graeber, took the same topics but treated them with respect. He went into the weeds, talked to the people instead of projecting on them and came out with Debt: The First 5000 Years. It is so jam packed with novel ideas and fascinating observations that is a joy to read at twice the length of Leviathan.

Go read that instead.

[Lyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book unfolded for me in three distinct sections. First, the author examines concepts of wilderness, freedom, and existing in a "state of nature". He asserts definitions for these which gave me pause and made me examine my own notions about these concepts, and I arrived at different definitions than he did. So far so good; the best type of disagreement is the kind that prompts you to discover more about your own ideas. The book goes on to introduce the overriding metaphor which will frame the rest of it, Civilization as Leviathan in opposition to Community. This confused me at first since it seemed an unnecessary obfuscation of the concepts being examined, but later I began to see that the author meant it less as a metaphor and more as a literal description. Interesting.

The bulk of the text then rather tediously recounts the unfolding of western civilization, spending a few sentences each on countless groups of people, invoking further metaphors (or are they?) in the form of the various historical deities (all tracing back to the same archetypes), and reading much like biblical genealogy with few points of real interest.

As the book draws to a close with the history of the Americas and the extermination of the last free people on earth, things once again get interesting. The authors closing arguments are thought-provoking and lead one to once again examine their own notions of reality.

Certainly a thought-provoking read, even if the midsection is fairly tedious.

[delievi · Rating 4 out of 5]

imma just put the quotes here cuz the feelings i have towards this book are hard to explain. i would give it five stars if only it didn't literally shatter some of the core beliefs i had. it really made more sense on the second read. anyways, what a book.

"Levithan has neither life nor soul. I ti is that it is. İt is its own sole goal. It is Death, unmitigated, unjustified, unexplained."

"Yet how many pages will be devoted to the greatness of Rome! And how many pages to the technological ingenuity of Rome’s war engines! Why not praise death itself? Death is an even greater killer than Rome. Is it the ornamented Greek palaces and monuments in the capital that make the brutality so reputable? If so, then to win such praise, Death need only hire Greek artists."

"The resistance is the only human component of the entire His-story. All the rest is Leviathanic Progress."

"Why does a Da Vinci gleams for us among the beast's innumerable cowbells? Is it because, after all the stunting and spirit-breaking that makes us Civilized, we still want to be what she was, but can no longer become even what he was, can only applaud what Leviathan becomes instead of us?"

[Sarkastodon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perlman retells history in terms of Hobbesian "leviathan," beginning in acient Sumer, going into serious detail about the various forms of assimilation of cultures into these Leviathans (e.g. nearly every ancient civilization you can think of, from the Hittites, Phoenecians, Assyrians, etc. through the Scythians, Romans, Arabs, etc.). Particular focus is on various outcast, maroon and pirate utopia societies which existed outside the domain of certain leviathans and governmental orders (e.g. the Adamites (of Bohemia and the Mediterenean), Servile uprisings in Rome, Heugonots, and many many many others. It ends somewhere around the age of conquest, after the New World has been completely destroyed of its original human habitat and replaced with the great 'worm' of civilization, but not before describing the various leviathans which existed in the Americas preceeding the arrival of westerners (e.g. Aztecs, Mayans). Also good writing on the Phoenicians who traded with the ancient Toltecs/Olmecs around 2000 years ago.

Absolutely a 'must read' for anybody into 'history' and anti-authoritarian 'ideologies' and practices.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arduous...satisfying. Dense, but textured and sensual...beautifully written, a vibrant panoptic account of civilization. Although centered in Eurasia, Perlman remembers to check in with how the east evolves. His heavily-researched story-line--which features constant demonstrations of historical counter-attacks to Leviathan,woven in with the mournful drama of gods, spirituality, art, and mythology--has creates a tangible story...one that has recalibrated my sense of where I stand in the history of existence and being human. Of course, bits are controversial, and he glides over several generations in thick single strokes. He doesn't have an index or glossary (though every reference yields results in a simple google search), which might deflect some readers expecting something more academic about the text. But given the nature and fluidity of this piece, it is a triumph. A very stirring, thoughtful, inspirational, humanist work.

[Evelyn R · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunate disappointment. Still has a few solid ideas mixed into the dross, but I had a few huge issues:

1. A fetishization of purity and wholeness that never existed and cannot exist
2. Maternal metaphors for nature that align neatly with #1 and that are often used in a patronizing and Romantic way.
3. Central metaphors of Leviathan, etc., never really move beyond misty abstractions that make for engaging poetry here and there but don't succeed in making the point he wants to.

Read Haraway, read Carolyn Merchant, read The Mushroom at the End of the World and other books like that if you want to really get at what kind of changes in our thinking we need to make to suit a more ecologically sound way of life.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely one of my top 5 books of all time. This should be used as a supplement in high school or college-level world history courses, to give a different (often more accurate) interpretation of how the world developed. While I don't agree with every jot and tittle of Perlman's manifesto (particularly his Leviathanic interpretation of the Old Testament), he puts much of global his-storical development into a simple framework that allows the true reasons for it to "shine through" - that is, for the Leviathan of greed, civilization, and progress to rear its ugly head.

[Melondrop · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? This is one of the books that I’ll remember as having changed my life. That I was waiting for. I know I’ll come back to it again and again, I’ve already referenced it so many times. The undead carcass is more visible to me now, more nameable, more tangible than it ever was before Fredy Perlman gave me the language I needed to feel its tendrils around me, described its body. Described us all as the animators within it. That resonates with something so deep inside of me.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only history book you will ever need. A comprehensive look at the meaning behind human history as told by Leviathan's priests and prognosticators. Finally, an honest appraisal of the threads that bind this story together and connect its events.

[Josh · Rating 1 out of 5]

If Ted Kaczynski was much, much dumber and liked David Thoreau. Earnestly thinking that being in a hunter-gatherer society lets you be free from work so you can focus on the self doesn't make you an anprim, it makes you a dumbass.

[Raleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poetic critique of civilization is truly spectacular. I recommend this to anyone who wants to understand history from a birds-eye perspective.

[Kerie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was absolutely brilliant and amazing. It is by far the best history and critique of civilization I've read to date. If I could give this more stars I would.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

You're supposed to read this as an anthro major in your second year of undergrad. So I've missed the critical window for acquiring uncritical appreciation of Perlman.
I was disappointed, googling around a bit, by how few of his contemporaries had anything to say about the biggest problem with the book, namely, the fact that in order to contrast what's so terrible about Civilization/Leviathan, he has to invent the pre-civilized human being. I mean, I really don't think there's any evidence of the ecstatic utopian state he believes humanity to have enjoyed before civilization came along and ruined everything by imposing hierarchy, but if there is, Perlman doesn't present it. This is a huge, huge problem for the book, because it's an unforced error -- isn't it enough to say that much has been lost to the Leviathan without demanding we accept that the Before Times were necessarily perfect, or superior?
That's not to say this has nothing going for it. It's beautifully written, with a deliberately subjective perspective on world history that's meant to throw contrast on the way the story is normally told to us. It is an intriguing jumping-off point from which to dig into some of the many outlandish claims he sprinkles around, sans citation, or any alternative perspective considered. And for every bit that doesn't work, there's something in here that I found genuinely rousing and inspiring.

[João Firmino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nada rejeita melhor a Civilização do que cobrir seis mil anos de história num livro sem escrever uma única data.

[Shaun]

Most of the time I was reading this, I felt like I was just pulling myself through the text because I had told myself that I would finish it. By the time I did finish it, I didn't regret the time spent - but I put it down twice as I succumbed to the allure of books with more immediate intrigue (actually I put it down the first time almost nine years ago). Overall this was a haunting essay, but one that I at least appreciated for it's voice.

I've been trying to wrap my head around Perlman's text for awhile, while immersed in it and in the aftermath of finishing it. The book's major failing for me is that it gives one the feeling you might get from reading a phonebook: a continual stream of names and references with very little context except within assumed relation to each other by categorization (alphabetization or, in the case of AHAL, chronology). Rather than ebb and flow with revelations, key points, rehashing of original points to create a flow, and maybe an illustrative anecdote here or there, AHAL is kind of like riding a slow rollercoaster down a continual grade with the brakes on. It's slow going, and when Perlman does hit the nail, the experience is almost buried in a mulch largely generated from his own metaphorical vernacular. It has been suggested that perhaps the bulk of the book wasn't accessible to me because I lack a particular education in older civilizations, which is fairly true. This could explain why the tail end of the book picked up a little bit for me - maybe I just understood the references better as the book approached the last 300 years or so.

Perlman pulls out a lot of questions early on about the very nature of what we assume to be the intentions or lives of past peoples through our current framework of (Civilization-justifying) historiography and (grave-robbing) archaeology - and this is still my favorite part of the whole text. Despite feeling like I was dragging myself through the book much of the time, what I enjoyed about AHAL is that it IS different from the relatively focused, anecdotal history I usually read, where microcosmic stories are told that extrapolate upon much more epic themes - AHAL, in simple terms, is the opposite. History is shared in many different ways, and a river of facts and relational information is only one way of history-telling (usually the other ways get dismissed as Mythology). In AHAL, Perlman tells the history of the slow grind of civilization as a weird, partially metaphorical rant, wherein a faceless, emotionless tide of ancient names with redundantly greedy (but very occasionally not) motivations drives his point home to the reader in a style that I can only assume was fueled by his intense passion. My guess is that Perlman was talking about the most horrible of monsters in as calm a manner as he may have been able to. If his intended follow-up to this book had ever been finished, I would tackle it.