I reviewed the anthropologist and activist David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment for the Daily Telegraph last month. Graeber died in 2020, rather before his time, and this book has had to be edited and published posthumously. I got the sense (e.g. from his verbose and intemperate responses to the mildest of criticisms of his earlier work here) that he was not a particularly nice person to be around unless one shared his views down to the smallest detail. But his book on Debt is exciting stuff, with plenty to provoke – both annoyance and, more happily, thought.
His central claim in the new book is that some of the central ideas of the Enlightenment were pioneered not in the salons of Europe but in pirate settlements along the Malagasy coast in the early eighteenth century, sites for a series of ‘self-conscious experiments in radical democracy’.
I’m not sure I’d recommend the book to anyone other than confirmed admirers of the man. I wrote:
There was another book that could have been made out of these materials, something closer to historical fiction that actually tried to be what Graeber promisingly describes as “a story about magic, lies, sea battles, purloined princesses, slave revolts, manhunts, make-believe kingdoms and fraudulent ambassadors”. But Graeber the historian ends up hedging nearly every factual claim of any interest with riders: “an admittedly rather fanciful passage”; “must have taken place”; “sources are meager”. He ends his book with a series of powerful rhetorical questions about the intellectual influence of the pirates: perhaps they were the real source of the ideas (liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy) made famous by the French Revolution. Was it, for instance, purely fantasy when Johnson wrote of the Malagasy pirates as setting an example of “an amicable Way of Life” for Europeans, settling disagreements through conversation rather than violence? But he must answer his questions with a melancholy, sheepish “We can only guess”, calling on future historians to find out more. One hopes they do. This unsatisfying book – too speculative to be a monograph, too scholarly to be a romance, and too messy to serve as a manifesto – leaves one thinking, “Important, if true.”
Graeber has received a similarly lukewarm – though more politely worded – review in the Guardian, by the historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala:
Graeber’s approach unfortunately also exaggerates the extent to which piratical social relations were truly revolutionary. When Defoe describes pirate communities as choosing 12 men by lot to settle disputes, for example, Graeber excitedly trumpets this as evidence of their novel “democratic institutions”, supposedly based on the uniquely egalitarian environment of a pirate ship. He doesn’t notice, as Defoe’s original readers surely would have, that the passage simply riffs on the well-known principle of trial by jury.
As anarchist anthropologists go, I prefer the work of James C. Scott, whose Domination and the Art of Resistance – a real classic – and its more tendentious successors (Seeing Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed) are superior attempts at this kind of thing. Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s detailed review of the latter book in the LRB captures something of what is nearly always unsatisfying about these attempts at anthropology as (radical) political philosophy
The brush that Scott uses here is very broad, and his conception anything but Popperian; no alternative hypothesis or contrary body of evidence is allowed much oxygen. One may suspect that this is because his method is usually to choose his examples once his hypothesis has been defined, and even if he is ‘mistaken in some particulars’, he isn’t worried that these will have any significance for the overall thesis. By taking such a stance, Scott is as far distant from the mainstream of political science and anthropology as he is from the mainstream of history. Like the work of [French anthropologist Pierre] Clastres, this book may well become a cult classic. But it equally runs the risk of leaving readers scratching their heads, not because it is obscure or incomprehensible, or because its claims are bold, but because its epistemological foundations are so unclear. Then again, perhaps it should be read not with the head but with the heart – which would only be to confirm that Scott’s work remains above all that of a pessimistic romantic.
That could just as easily be a description of Graeber’s work.