Abstract

Going in search of denied finds, of cultures that have failed, but have tried to «choose» a path of structures without domination, without slavery, without violence. Graeber and Wengrow call several voices to support their attempt to research outside the verum et factum convertuntur, out of the hegemonic postulate of our western culture as the best of all possible worlds. Clastres, Gimbutas, Steiner, Testart, Scott, not all in agreement, and not with everyone equally in agreement, but in various ways in any case all outside the dominant orchestral score, and linked to the dormient myth of état de nature… But Graeber and Wengrow don’t know what to do with evolution or the state of nature. What they want, and say they will do, is a parallel history. A new history of humanity… no less. Their review of cases, of civilizations of hunters and gatherers, of proto-farmers, of the first sovereign kingdoms (Mesopotamia, Ukraine, India (Harappa)) serves to demonstrate how many other possible beginnings have appeared in history and have given testimony to that plurality of destinies that remained unfinished. The crucial question nonetheless keeps its dramatic urgence: why so many lines of alternative development have failed? Why a dominant trunk of evolutionary fate, our unpleasant market-ruled culture imposed itself over the whole humankind?