Edward Carver in LA Review of Books:
WHEN HE died unexpectedly in 2020, American anthropologist and left-wing activist David Graeber was best known for his 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a revisionist history of money, and his involvement in Occupy Wall Street. He helped coin the catchphrase “We are the 99 percent.”
But before he became a swashbuckling public intellectual, his work focused on Madagascar, where he did doctoral research on the legacy of slavery in a highlands village. In his posthumous new book, Pirate Enlightenment, or The Real Libertalia, he returns to the subject of Madagascar to tell a story that challenges Eurocentric ideas about the origins of the Enlightenment.
Pirate Enlightenment was first published in French in 2019. The publishing house that released it, Libertalia, is in fact named after a pirate utopia in Madagascar that was depicted in an English-language book in the 1720s but probably didn’t exist. Graeber is interested in the legend only insofar as it indicates the kind of political stories that were circulating in European coffeehouses. He regards it as a European fantasy, in which the Malagasy act only as antagonists to the utopians in the tale. The “Real Libertalia” of Graeber’s book is, in contrast, about the political arrangements of the Malagasy.
This builds on Graeber’s other work, including “There Never Was a West, or Democracy Emerges from the Spaces In Between,” a 2007 essay in which he argues that the ideas of freedom, democracy, and equality are not principally Western. In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), he and co-author David Wengrow, an archaeologist, dig up evidence that many complex societies existed without much hierarchy and that Enlightenment conceptions of human liberation flowed from many ancient and Indigenous traditions.
More here.