3.5
The Utopia of Rules
By David GraeberPublisher Description
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.
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities25 Reviews
3.5
pandapuffs
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Pablo
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Charlotte
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Isaac Lumley
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“I will reread this in a few years lol I feel like half of it went over my head”
Steven Moeller
Created 12 months agoShare
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“I love David Graeber. Given all my other attitudes about the world, he might have found that alarming. But Graeber’s sharp, funny, and sometimes profound. He actually got his hands dirty in the real world. I almost always learn something from him. And whenever I read Graeber I think for a moment about converting to fanatical Graeberism. “I should be more like this man,” I think.
All of which is why I report with reluctance that I did not like this book. Oh, the first section is great. I was stoked. But in time I found my enthusiasm growing insincere and eventually, despite some effort to browbeat myself into liking the book, disappearing altogether. In the middle of this book is an extended riff to the effect that the financialization of the American economy has empowered bureaucrats to smother necessary, ambitious research and development (Graber’s argument that the tax laws encourage this is more right than he knows), and that the government encouraged the reorientation of the economy away from manufacturing and consumer goods and towards finance, telecommunications, and advertising for generally terrible reasons.
I’m not sure what to do with this. I agree that in various ways the government encourages corporations to do stock buybacks and pursue other schemes for boosting quarterly earnings at the corporation’s, and society’s, expense. And the tech industry’s sweaty obsession with presenting itself as morally evolved almost perfectly mirrors the extent to which so many of its most prominent companies are really just defense contractors or, like SpaceX, defense-adjacent government contractors. But I am no closer to understanding why bureaucracy as such is responsible for these developments than I was when I began the book. Much simpler to say that we elected the wrong leaders who enacted bad policies and that it turned out flying cars were a terrible idea.
I was rolling my eyes at the appendix, which is really a kind of angry rant about Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, which Graeber characterizes as a fascist attack on him and Occupy Wall Street. Nolan said it was vaguely inspired by the French Revolution, but Graeber literally accuses Nolan of lying about this. I guess I’d be mad if I thought a movie was about me, specifically. And yeah, sure, the movie’s politics—like those of every other comic book story—are a mess. But I couldn’t help but think of the great philosopher, dril: “and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.”
If you want some lighter Graeber, read Bullshit Jobs, which I loved.”
About David Graeber
David Graeber (1961-2020) was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. One of the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street, Graeber was also the author of Utopia of Rules and wrote widely for publications such as The Guardian, Harper’s, The Baffler, The Wall Street Journal, n+1, The Nation, The Washington Post, The New Inquiry, and The New Left Review.
Other books by David Graeber
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