The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . .: Essays

Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, the iconic and bestselling David Graeber's most important essays and interviews.

"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic books as Debt and the breakout New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow), Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes.

There are converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics is dominated by either business as usual or nostalgia for a mythical past. Graeber was one of the few who dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time—inequality, technology, the identity of “the West,” democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest—he challenges the old assumptions about political life. Driven by a bold imagination and a passionate commitment to human freedom, he offers hope that our world can be different.

The incisive, playful, and urgent essays collected in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . , edited and with an introduction by Nika Dubrovksy and with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit, are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an iconic thinker.

About the Author

David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia; Debt: The First 5,000 Years; and Bullshit Jobs, among many others books, and the coauthor with David Wengrow of The Dawn of Everything, a New York Times bestseller. An iconic thinker and a renowned activist, he died in 2020.