David Wengrow

the whole story we summarized in the last chapter – our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique

As Christopher Boehm puts it, we seem doomed to play out an endless recycling of the war between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’: those who view humans as either innately hierarchical or innately egalitarian.

Aristotle was right when he described human beings as ‘political animals’