David Graeber.

Biography

David Graeber (1961–2020) was an American anthropologist, a professor at the London School of Economics and an intellectual associated with anarchist movements and experiments in direct democracy. He earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago, carried out ethnographic research in Madagascar and developed a body of work connecting history, economic anthropology, the critique of bureaucracy and political imagination.

In Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), he challenged conventional accounts of the origins of money and examined relationships between economic obligations, morality and power. In The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018), he addressed the paradoxes of bureaucratic organisation and contemporary work. His involvement in debates and mobilisations associated with Occupy Wall Street extended the public reach of his research.

Together with archaeologist David Wengrow, he wrote The Dawn of Everything (2021), published after his death, which proposed a reconsideration of linear narratives concerning the origins of inequality, the state and social hierarchies. His thinking emphasised the historical diversity of forms of cooperation and humanity's capacity to invent different institutions. Graeber became a point of reference for critical studies of capitalism, political anthropology and theories of emancipation.