David Rolfe Graeber was born on 12 February 1961. He trained as an anthropologist and joined Yale University in 1998, specialising in theories of value and social theory. Over nearly a decade as assistant then associate professor, he built the intellectual foundations that would inform his later books. When Yale chose not to renew his position ahead of a tenure decision — a move that prompted a petition signed by more than 4,500 academics — he moved to Goldsmiths, University of London, serving as Reader in Social Anthropology from 2007 to 2013, before joining the London School of Economics as a professor.
His book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) argued that debt — not barter — was the original medium of human exchange, and that credit arrangements predated coined money by millennia. The argument reframed conventional economic history and reached a wide readership well beyond academic circles. Subsequent work extended the critique: The Utopia of Rules (2015) examined bureaucracy as a form of structural coercion, while Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018) made the case that a significant proportion of modern employment serves no meaningful purpose — social or productive.
Graeber died on 2 September 2020. The Dawn of Everything, published posthumously, extended his career-long questioning of settled assumptions about human society and history. Throughout his life he combined scholarship with anarchist activism, declining to separate the two. His books remain in print and widely assigned in anthropology, economics, and political theory; his arguments about debt, labour, and the nature of work continue to be discussed in and well beyond academic life.
The Dawn of Everything
A radical retelling of human history — evidence that societies have always been far more diverse, experimental, and free than we assumed.