From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives
Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence?
To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy.
Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible.
An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.
Graeber returns with another lively investigation of injustice How has bureaucracy combined “financialization, violence, technology, the fusion of public and private” as all “knit together into a single self-sustaining web”? In these three essays, two already published but reworked somewhat, David Graeber turns to this question. In his “Debt: The First 5000 Years” (reviewed by me May Day 2014) he looked at how this single web expanded to tangle all of us, long ago. In “The Democracy Project” (reviewed by me June 2014), he…
A Fresh Take on Bureaucracy What intense pleasure this book gave me, despite the dull topic: bureaucracy. Anthropologist David Graeber is perhaps best known for “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” (2011), which became required reading for the Occupy Wall Street movement. In that book, Graeber showed that the standard explanation for the origins of money, rehearsed in dozens of economics textbooks, was a fairy tale. In “The Utopia of Rules,” Graeber similarly claims that the conventional wisdom about bureaucracy…
Maybe not what you think… Despite its intriguing and compelling title, this book is not a diatribe against bureaucracy (although plenty of phrases therein are delightful for their insightful exposes of bureaucracy). It’s really an essay on the tension between creative and conservative forces. As such, it’s difficult to put one’s finger on its main thesis other than to say that it is an exploratory endeavor–which isn’t a “thesis” at all. It is an important book because it makes you think about work and politics…