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

“This brilliant posthumous collection . . . serves as a revealing portrait of Graeber himself . . . It’s an invigorating testament to a life spent challenging the status quo.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“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, Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting volumes.

Thinking against the grain, Graeber dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future—to imagine a social order based on humans’ fundamental freedom. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time, he challenges the old assumptions about political life. A trenchant critic of the order of things, driven by a bold imagination and a passionate commitment to human freedom, he offers hope that our world can be different.

In this moment of daunting upheaval and pervasive despair, the incisive, entertaining, and urgent essays collected in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . make for essential and inspiring reading. They are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an iconic, playful, necessary thinker.

About the Author

David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He was the author of Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia; Debt: The First 5,000 Years; and Bullshit Jobs, among many other 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.