L'alba di tutto

Una nuova storia dell'umanità

Hardcover, 752 pages

Italiano language

Published Jan. 31, 2022 by Rizzoli.

ISBN:
978-88-17-15882-4
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5 stars (3 reviews)

Da dove nascono la guerra, l'avidità, lo sfruttamento, l'insensibilità alle sofferenze altrui? E qual è l'origine della disuguaglianza, ormai riconosciuta come uno dei problemi più drammatici e radicati del nostro tempo? Da secoli, le risposte a queste domande si limitano a rielaborare le visioni contrapposte dei due padri della filosofia politica: Jean-Jacques Rousseau e Thomas Hobbes. Stando al primo, per la maggior parte della loro esistenza gli esseri umani hanno vissuto in minuscoli gruppi ugualitari di cacciatori-raccoglitori. A un certo punto, però, a incrinare quel quadro idilliaco è arrivata l'agricoltura, che ha portato alla nascita della proprietà privata. Poi sono apparse le città, e con esse si è affermata l'organizzazione fortemente gerarchica di quella che chiamiamo «civiltà». Per Hobbes, al contrario, la necessità di imporre un rigido ordine sociale si è imposta per contenere la natura individualista e violenta dell'essere umano, altrimenti sarebbe stato impossibile progredire organizzandosi in grandi gruppi. …

2 editions

Beyond great.

5 stars

Dream quests. Empires without war. Women leadership. A city centered around hallucinogenic journeys filled with weird architecture. An enlightenment of democratic settlements blossoming from the ruins of a centralized, aggressive kingdom throughout the current USA. Being able to travel across all of North America and find allied clans who must help you, even though you don't share the same language. People groups taking up farming, and then discarding it. The potential origins of private property. Axes of ideas that lead to entrenched arbitrary power, and the multiplicative danger that comes when multiple axes are involved.

The authors do cherry-pick examples from history to support their thesis that people throughout history lived in a wide variety of political structures, and that history is not stuck in a set evolutionary channel, because, well, that's what actually happened. History is much more complicated than most people think, and this means that the present …

An account of how unimaginative we seem to be at the moment

No rating

How else could we organize ourselves? How did we lose "the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations with one another"?

This book gets into the weeds of anthropology and archaeology, but it's "zoom out" moments are really interesting. The Rousseau/Hobbes debate leaves out much and, they argue, makes everything much more boring than in actually is, given the actual data available about previous social arrangements.

How did we get stuck? We have forgotten that social organization have been a matter of play, tinkering, and sometimes is even dependent on things like seasonal changes. It feels like we are in the least playful and least imaginative epoch, succumbing to the ideology of Thatcher's "There is no alternative."

One interesting set of arguments in the book is about scale. Received wisdom says that structures of domination are tied to population scaling up. Larger, more dense populations means complexity, which …