“[Adam Smith] referred to the apex of development as 'commercial society', in which a complex division of labor demanded the sacrifice of primitive liberties but guaranteed dazzling increases in overall wealth and prosperity.”

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“Leviathan, published in 1651, is in many ways the founding text of modern political theory. It held that, humans being the selfish creatures they are, life in an original State of Nature was 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' – basically, a state of war, with everybody fighting against everybody else... Human society, in this view, is founded on the collective repression of our baser instincts... Hierarchy and domination, cynical self-interest”

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“all the major schools of speculative philosoophy we know today seem to have emerged – apparently independently – in Greece, India and China at roughly the same time... the period that saw the birth of all today's world religions”

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“an egalitarian ethos can take one of two directions: it can either deny such individual quirks entirely, and insist that people are (or at least should be) treated as if they were exactly the same; or it can celebrate their quirks in such a way as to imply that everyone is so profoundly different that any overall ranking would be inconceivable.”

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“ancient Greek writers were well aware of the tendency for elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. That is why they considered elections an aristocratic mode of political appointment, quite at odds with democratic principles; and why for much of European history the truly democratic way of filling offices was assumed to be by lottery.”

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“Any member of an Iroquoian society given an order would have fiercely resisted it as a throat to their personal autonomy – but the main exception to this norm was, precisely, dreams... Dreams were treated as if they were commands”

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“Around 8000 years ago, the site Tell Sabi Abyad shows affinities betwen distant households and families increasingly based on a priniple of cultural uniformity, the first era of the 'global village'.”

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“As money is to promises, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted... This is what gives the word 'bureaucracy' such a distasteful association almost everywhere today. The very term evokes mechanical stupidity. It gives the local enforcer the ability to say, 'Rules are rules; I don't want to hear about it'”

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“Bali supports one of the densest populations on earth by a complex system of irrigated wet-rice agriculture... governed by a series of 'water-temples', through which the distribution of water was managed by an even more complex systems of consensual decision-making, according to egalitarian principles, by the farmers themselves.”

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“based on statistical frequencies of health indicators from ancient burials... our species is a nurturing and care-giving species, and there was simply no need for life to be nasty, brutish or short.”

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“Before the Shang, nothing particularly interesting was supposed to have happened... Nobody expected archaeologists to find there a 4000 year-old city extending over 400 hectares with a great stone wall enclosing palaces and a step-pyramid, lording it over a subservient rural hinterland nearly 1000 years pre-Shang.”

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“democracy, as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers payed out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlookers.”

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“Elias Canetti, a novelist and social philosopher often written off as one of those offbeat mid-century central European thinkers no one knows quite what to do with... had put his finger on something important, something almost everyone else had overlooked. Very large social units are aways, in a sense, imaginary... there is aways a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friend and famiiy, people and place that we actually know directly and the way one relates to nations and metropoises”

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“ever since Friedrich Engels used the Iroquois as a prime example... there have been lively debates about whether there was ever a thing that might legitimately be referred to as "primitive communism"”

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“frequently the most violent inequalities seem to arise from fictions of legal equality... this equality could be viewed as making people (as well as things) interchangeable which in turn allowed rulers to make impersonal demands that took no consideration of their subjects' unique situations.”

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“grain-based kingdoms were fragile, always prone to collapse under the weight of over-population, ecological devastation and the kind of endemic diseases that always seemed to result when too many humans, domesticated animals and parasites accumulated in one place.”

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“Harari starts off with a perfectly reasonable observation... overstates his case... like so many others, chooses to compare early humans with apes... Why did Harari choose chimps instead of bikers?,,, [instead of] the obvious thing to compare one group of human beings with another group of human beings.”

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“If humans were incapable of hurting each other, no one would be able to declare something absolutely sacred to themselves or to defend it... they could only exclude those who agreed to be excluded.”

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“If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current stat of the world, it's hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence”

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“in all parts of the world, small communities formed civilizations without permanent kings, bureaucrats or standing armies and developed major textile technologies, the potters wheel, stone industries and beadwork, the sail and maritime navigation”

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“In ancient Egypt, significant political accomplishments occured in precisely those periods (the so-called 'dark ages') that get dismissed or overlooked because no one was building grandiose monuments in stone.”

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“In China, archaeology has opened a yawning chasm between the birth of cities and the appearance of the earliest named royal dynasty, the Shang.”

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“In the case of the Americas from roughly AD 1050 to 1350, there was, in what's now East St. Luis, a city known to history as Cahokia with a population that peaked at c, 15,000 people; then abruptly dissolved becoming a place of ruins and bitter memories, a rejection of urbanization”

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“In the considered opinion of the Montagnais-Nakapi, the French were little better than slaves, living in constant terror of their superiors.”

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“In the time of the late Shang, the Shang capital at Anyang laid out a grand stage for royal ritual. The city was suspended between the worlds of the living and the dead. Shang rulers routinely waged war to acquire stocks of living human victims for sacrifices.”

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“indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader's own than 17th Century European ones... indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies and Europeans did not... both sides agreed this was the case. What they differed on was whether or not individual liberty was desirable.”

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“indigenous North American ideas – from the advocacy of individual liberties to skepticism of revealed religion – certainly had an impact on the European Enlightenment, even though, like pipe-smoking, such ideas underwent many transformations in the process.”

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“Marxists concentrated on forms of domination, and the move out of primitive communism towards slavery, feudalism and capitalism, to be followed by socialism (then communism). All these approaches were basically unworkable, and eventually had to be throw away”

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“Most people who write history on a grand scale seem to have decided that, as a species, we are well and truly stuck and there is really no escape from the institutional cages we've made for ourselves.”

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“One problem with evolutionism is that it takes ways of life that developed in symbiotic relation with each other and reorganizes them into separate stages of human history... at the same time, the publication of Darwin's theories meant that evolutionism became entrenched as the only possible scientific approach to history.”

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“Pharaonic Egypt, Inca Peru, Aztec Mexico, Han China, Imperial Rome, ancient Greece... All these were deeply stratified societies held together mostly by authoritarian government, violence, and the radical subordination of women... and the sacrifice of our three basic freedoms, and of life itself, for the sake of something always out of reach”

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“Rousseau was indeed a crucial figure in the formation of left-wing thought... Many conservative thinkers see Rousseau as creating what we now think of as the political left... [He] did in fact write the founding document of the left”

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“Slavery finds its origins in war. But everywhere we encounter it, slavery is also, at first, a domestic institution... the most brutal forms of exploitation have their origins in the most intimate of social relations”

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“the Book of Genesis is also one of history's most enduring charters for the hatred of women”

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“the concept of 'civilization' is still largely reserved for societies whose defining characteristics include high-handed autocrats, imperial conquests and the use of slave labor... hierarchical ranks, governed from the top down.”

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“the English word 'free' ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning 'friend' – since unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises.”

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“the Enlightenment marked a fundamental break in human history... introducing a possibility that had simply not existed before: that of self-conscious projects for reshaping society in accord with some rational ideal. That is, of genuine revolutionary politics.”

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“the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one's society could take and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another... precisely what other primates never do, at least not to our knowledge.”

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“The problem with this kind of power is that it tends to be intensely personal. It is almost impossible to delegate. The king's sovereignty extends about as far as the king himself can walk, reach, see, or be carried.”

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“the reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples. Because it was true.”

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“the unforeseen consequences of adopting a technology (agriculture) that Jared Diamon has characterized as 'the worst mistake in the history of the human race.'”

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“there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is he very fact of alternation, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities”

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“there's no actual reason to assume that war has always existed... it's almost invariably necessary to employ some combination of ritual, drugs, and psychological techniques to convince people, even adolescent males, to kill and injure each other is such systematic yet indiscriminate ways.”

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“they concluded that the original state of humanity was one of freedom and equality, for better or worse. (Hobbes, for example, definitely felt it was worse.)”

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“We can take Pinker as our quintessential Hobbesian... like Hobbes, Pinker is concerned with the origins of the state, his key point of transition not the rise of farming but the emergence of cities... a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along.”

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“we seem doomed to play out an endless recycling of the war between... those who view humans as either innately hierarchial or innately equalitarian.”

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“What until now has passed for 'civilization' might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their clams in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its center.”

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“where evidence exists, it points to strong associations between women and plant-based knowledge as far back as one can trace such things... Harvesting wild plants and turning them into food, medicine, and complex structures like baskets or clothing is almost everywhere a female activity [but] Consciously or not, it is the contributions of women that get written out of such accounts.”

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“where one wishes to set the dial between freedom and determinism is largely a matter of taste... we can't really know how much difference 'human agency', – the preferred term for what used to be called 'free will' – really makes.”

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“while gorillas do nor mock each other for beating their chests, humans do so regularly.”

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“while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behavior, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way.”

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