David Graeber
David Graeber (1961–2020) was an American anthropologist, anarchist, and writer whose work examined debt, bureaucracy, value, and political action.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years: A 2011 book arguing that debt and credit long predate money and have shaped societies and moral life. This book made Graeber’s historical account of debt his best-known argument.
Marshall Sahlins: An American anthropologist known for influential work on culture, history, and economic anthropology. Sahlins supervised Graeber’s doctoral work and influenced his approach to anthropology.
Bureaucracy: An administrative system organized through offices, formal rules, and hierarchical authority. Graeber analyzed how bureaucratic procedures shape power and constrain imagination.
Barter theory of money: The account that money arose to overcome the inconveniences of direct exchange of goods and services. Graeber challenged this familiar origin story with historical evidence for credit before coinage.
We are the 99%: A slogan associated with Occupy Wall Street that contrasts the majority with the wealthiest one percent. Graeber helped bring the phrase into the movement’s public vocabulary.
Bullshit Jobs: A 2018 book arguing that many workers believe their jobs contribute little or nothing to society. Graeber developed his critique of meaningless work into a widely discussed book.
Maurice Bloch: A British social anthropologist whose work explores ritual, power, cognition, and political economy. Bloch was a key interlocutor in Graeber’s anthropological debates about value and social life.
Debt: An obligation to repay money, goods, or services owed to another party. Graeber treated debt as a moral and political relation, not merely an economic one.
Rational choice theory: A framework that models people as choosing actions to maximize preferences under constraints. Graeber disputed its assumption that self-interested calculation explains economic life across cultures.
The Dawn of Everything: A 2021 book by David Graeber and David Wengrow reinterpreting the deep history of human societies. Published after Graeber’s death, it extended his challenge to linear stories of social evolution.