Narrating Humanity: From Graeber & Wengrow to Rousseau

This article proposes that both The Dawn of Everything and Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality belong to a genre, in a formal and material sense. The genre to which both Rousseau’s Discourse and The Dawn of Everything belong involves the postulation of a narrative regarding the origins and stages of human civilization in such a way as to serve as an argument for what contemporary societies should look like. But the Dawn of Everything and the Discourse also embody divergent accounts of evidence and how it works in philosophical and historical argument. What distinguishes Rousseau’s Discourse from Graeber & Wengrow is its skepticism with regard to the categories of “fact” and “evidence,” and its epistemological and generic attention to the distinction between modes of thinking that, in its terms, are “philosophical” or “historical”, as well as the related way that it plays with the concepts of “nature” and “history”.