Kelly Albrecht’s Reviews > The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity > Status Update

“If private property has an ‘origin’, it is as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself. The pertinent question to ask is not so much when this happened, as how it eventually came to order so many other aspects of human affairs.”

“In the nineteenth century, Marx and many of his fellow radicals did imagine that it was possible to administer such a surplus collectively, in an equitable fashion, but contemporary thinkers tend to be more skeptical. In fact, a dominant view among anthropologists nowadays is that the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all. “

“We are creatures of excess, and this is what makes us simultaneously the most creative, and most destructive of species. Ruling classes are simply those who have organized society in such a way that they can extract the lion’s share of that surplus for themselves, whether through tribute, slavery, feudal dues, or manipulating ostensibly free-market arrangements.”

“There was a clear link between seasonal variations of social structure and a certain kind of political freedom. The fact that one structure applied in the rainy season and another in the dry allowed Nambikwara chiefs to view their own social arrangements at one remove: to see them not simply as ‘given’, in the natural order of things, but as something at least partially open to human intervention.”