“There are lots of excellent heterodox critiques of economics, but almost all are provided by economists. I presume this is true of other fields as well. If a problem were obvious enough to be spotted by outsiders, chances are it would already be the subject of dispute within the field. An anthropologist named David Graeber provides an excellent example of what goes wrong when you don’t understand the field you are criticizing.”
David Graeber
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More by David Graeber

“Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.”

David Graeber

“One could well argue that if there is any human essence, it is precisely our capacity to imagine that we have one.”

David Graeber

“Marxist schools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists, Trotksyites , Gramscians, Althusserians... (Note how the list starts with heads of state and ...”

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“At the very least, one would imagine being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities are run—and I don’t mean by demanding an anarchist studies department, either—and t...”

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“Egoism and altruism are ideas we have about human nature. Historically, one has tended to arise in response to the other. In the ancient world,for example, it is generally in the times and places that...”

David Graeber