Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
Author(s): David Graeber
One of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023 The final book from David Graeber, the iconic intellectual, activist, and co-author of the New York Times bestseller, The Dawn of Everything. Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies-- vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of European empire. In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar, producing what would eventually become a doctoral thesis on the island's magic, slavery, and politics. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group made up of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the True Libertalia, Graeber's final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research, written while he and David Wengrow were working on what would become their major bestseller, The Dawn of Everything. In direct conversation with that work, Graeber explores how the proto-democratic, even libertarian practices of the Zana-Malata came to shape the Enlightenment project defined for too long as distinctly European. The result is a short but sweeping exploration of the non-European origins of what we consider to be "Western" thought, and an endeavor to recover forgotten forms of social and political order that gesture toward new, hopeful possibilities for the future.
Product Information
Chatty, punky, anti-everything catnip... it is good fun. It's about pirates, after all. * Sunday Times *
Engaging ... the chief pleasure of Graeber's writing is not that one always agrees with his arguments about the past. It is rather that, through a series of provocative thought experiments, he repeatedly forces us to reconsider our own ways of living in the present. Whatever happened in 18th-century Madagascar, Pirate Enlightenment implies, we could surely all do with a bit more free-thinking and egalitarianism in our own social, sexual and political arrangements. -- Fara Dabhoiwala * The Guardian *
Open and imaginative... Graeber is writing in a hybrid genre of poetic history, in this sense, but he is also reminding us why such hybridisation is good for us. * New Statesman *
A characteristically radical re-reading of history that places the social and political experiments of pirates at the heart of the European Enlightenment. A brilliant companion volume to the best-selling Dawn of Everything. -- Amitav Ghosh
Feisty, heroic ... a highly original thinker and a wonderful writer. -- Peter Frankopan * New York Times *
A genius... blazingly original, stunningly wide-ranging, impossibly well read. * The Atlantic *
A thinker who revolutionises the way we see the world and helps us reimagine the things we once took for granted. * New Statesman *
PRAISE FOR THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING: Iconoclastic and irreverent ... an exhilarating read. -- David Priestland * The Guardian *
Pacey and potentially revolutionary ... This is more than an argument about the past, it is about the human condition in the present. -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *
Blazing with iconoclastic rebuttals to conventional wisdom. Full of fresh thinking, it's a pleasure to read and offers a bracing challenge on every page. -- Simon Sebag Montefiore * BBC History *
This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Author Biography: David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of, among others, The Dawn of Everything- A New History of Humanity, Debt- The First 5,000 Years, Bullshit Jobs- A Theory, and Pirate Enlightenment, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, the Guardian, and the Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts helped to make Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on 2 September 2020.
General Fields
- :
- : Penguin UK
- : Penguin Press
- : 160.0
- : 30 April 2024
- : 1.2 Centimeters X 12.9 Centimeters X 19.8 Centimeters
- : 01 May 2024
- : books
Special Fields
- : David Graeber
- : Paperback
- : 208
- : HBTB