The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...

Essays

By: David Graeber, Nika Dubrovsky - editor, Rebecca Solnit - introduction

Narrated by: Jacques Servin, Savitri D

The most important essays and interviews from the remarkable multi-decade career of David Graeber, the hugely influential and bestselling co-author of The Dawn of Everything.

"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 he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes.

Today we live amidst converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics are dominated by either a "business as usual" attitude 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, mutual aid, and protest—he challenges old assumptions about political life. A trenchant critic of the order of things, and driven by a bold imagination and a passionate commitment to human freedom, he offers hope for a more equitable world.

During a moment of daunting upheaval and pervasive despair, the incisive, entertaining, and urgent essays collected in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . , edited and introduced by Nika Dubrovsky and with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit, make for essential and inspiring reading. They are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an iconic, playful, necessary thinker.

Critic reviews

“Ambitious and erudite essays (...) An ideal entry point to new readers (...) for those returning to his ideas, the pleasure is in the writing, filled as it is with historical heft, global prescience, and a vast breadth of reference by the seemingly omniscient author (...) Graeber’s essays remain intense flares of thought lighting a path towards something better than “the best of all possible worlds”, which is a place where we all too readily resign ourselves.” – Irish Times