Rousseau, a man who spent his life having all his needs attended to by servants. Really?

Being a keen consumer of history, I read the review of a new book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.  Graeber was an anthropologist and Wengrow an archaeologist which sounded a promising combination of fields.  I always enjoy a new perspective with fresh eyes.  

However, the review raised several alarm bells.  

One August night in 2020, David Graeber — the anthropologist and anarchist activist who became famous as an early organizer of Occupy Wall Street — took to Twitter to make a modest announcement.

“My brain feels bruised with numb surprise,” he wrote, riffing on a Doors lyric. “It’s finished?”

He was referring to the book he’d been working on for nearly a decade with the archaeologist David Wengrow, which took as its immodest goal nothing less than upending everything we think we know about the origins and evolution of human societies.

An anarchist and an Occupy Wall Street organizer?  OK, perhaps this is less about history and more about ideology.

The goals of "upending everything we think we know" is similar to that of "fundamentally transforming America" as red flags.  They signal goals rather than processes.  Ideology over free thinking.  

In a video interview last month, Wengrow, a professor at University College London, slipped into a mock-grandiose tone to recite one of Graeber’s favorite catchphrases: “We are going to change the course of human history — starting with the past.”

That strikes awfully close to the old Soviet joke based on Soviet's need to keep rewriting history in order to serve the propaganda needs of the moment - "In Soviet Russia the future is known. It's the past that's ever-changing."  Mocking self-irony or just ignorance?

But all of this, Graeber and Wengrow argue, is wrong. Recent archaeological discoveries, they write, show that early humans, far from being automatons blindly moving in evolutionary lock step in response to material pressures, self-consciously experimented with “a carnival parade of political forms.”

It’s a more accurate story, they argue, but also “a more hopeful and more interesting” one.

“We are all projects of collective self-creation,” they write. “What if, instead of telling the story about how our society fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”

An intriguing premise, sort of, but the usual histories don't treat humans as "being automatons blindly moving in evolutionary lock step in response to material pressures."  That's just a strawman created to be town down.  That's not a high integrity approach.

“The Dawn of Everything” includes discussions of princely burials in Europe during the ice age, contrasting attitudes toward slavery among the Indigenous societies of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, the political implications of dry-land versus riverbed farming, and the complexity of preagricultural settlements in Japan, among many, many other subjects.

But the dazzling range of references raises a question: Who is qualified to judge whether it’s true?

Reviewing the book in The Nation, the historian Daniel Immerwahr called Graeber “a wildly creative thinker” who was “better known for being interesting than right” and asked if the book’s confident leaps and hypotheses “can be trusted.”

And Immerwahr deemed at least one claim — that colonial American settlers captured by Indigenous people “almost invariably” chose to stay with them — “ballistically false,” claiming that the authors’ single cited source (a 1977 dissertation) “actually argues the opposite.”

There were a couple of allusions in the review to indicate that the ideology and freeform thinking, unconstrained by facts, might have yielded interesting and useful insights. 

Perhaps.  But at some point, I am less interested in expanding my reading of fantasy and more interested in reading plausibly true history.  The intimations of simple misrepresentation of facts was enough for me to foreclose any interest in reading the book.

Then I see this.  

Graeber and Wengrow demonstrating cavalier ignorance of the Enlightenment: “The authors who submitted their essays to this competition [on the origins of inequality] were men who spent their lives having all their needs attended to by servants… Rousseau was one such man…” /1

— David A. Bell (@DavidAvromBell) November 10, 2021

Click for the thread.

Did they really write that?  Sometimes excerpts missing the full context of a passage.  Here is the full passage.

“In March 1754, the learned society known as the Académie des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Dijon announced a national essay competition on the question: ‘what is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?’ What we’d like to do in this chapter is ask: why is it that a group of scholars in Ancien Régime France, hosting a national essay contest, would have felt this was an appropriate question in the first place? The way the question is put, after all, assumes that social inequality did have an origin; that is, it takes for granted that there was a time when human beings were equals – and that something then happened to change this situation. 

 

That is actually quite a startling thing for people living under an absolutist monarchy like that of Louis XV to think. After all, it’s not as if anyone in France at that time had much personal experience of living in a society of equals. This was a culture in which almost every aspect of human interaction – whether eating, drinking, working or socializing – was marked by elaborate pecking orders and rituals of social deference. The authors who submitted their “essays to this competition were men who spent their lives having all their needs attended to by servants. They lived off the patronage of dukes and archbishops, and rarely entered a building without knowing the precise order of importance of everyone inside. Rousseau was one such man: an ambitious young philosopher, he was at the time engaged in an elaborate project of trying to sleep his way into influence at court. The closest he’d likely ever come to experiencing social equality himself was someone doling out equal slices of cake at a dinner party. Yet everyone at the time also agreed that this situation was somehow unnatural; that it had not always been that way. 

 

If we want to understand why that was, we need to look not only at France, but also at France’s place in a much larger world.”

Yes, they did write that ROusseau was a man having all his needs met by servants.  As the tweeters point out, even if you don't know much French history or much about Rousseau, it doesn't take much effort to find out.  Here is the Wikipedia entry for Rousseau.

A five minute reading confirms Rousseau was indeed born into an artisan middle-class family but one which was unsettled financially and maritally.  Never quite an orphan, Rousseau was at best on the margin of polite society and had to make his way through his own efforts and wits, working as a servant, secretary, and tutor.  From his mid-twenties onwards, Rousseau was frequently penniless and even when earning an income, receiving it on an intermittent basis.  

It goes on and on.  Rousseau was a callous man, brusque with his social superiors, presumptuous with supporters.  He knew of the good life but he was not by any means possibly to be considered one of the "men who spent their lives having all their needs attended to by servants."  

If this is their level of knowledge about a central a figure such as Rousseau where the facts are so easily confirmed or denied, how can one possibly warrant investing time in any of the their other arguments?  They may be creative in their insights but those insights are only worthwhile if based on some grasp of factual history.  Without that grasp, they are merely offering imaginings for you to confirm to your own satisfaction.  

There are better uses of always limited time.