How to Narrate History to Inspire a Better Future

As a reader with a taste for sweeping accounts of human history that provide insight into how we got to our present moment and how we might ameliorate the current state of humanity, I remain intrigued by Graeber and Wengrow’s larger dream that humans today could govern themselves more imaginatively. I also am deeply grateful to the contributors to this special issue for illuminating Rousseau’s prior yet in some ways more sophisticated philosophical critique of Western culture. I am further appreciative of the crucial historical contexts—from seventeenth-century France to nineteenth-century Massachusetts (with student responses from twenty-first-century Cleveland, Ohio and Baton Rouge, Louisiana)—offered in the following essays, contexts that provide granular detail that will allow us to continue to explore and reflect on the barriers to humanity’s unrealized potential.