Mastodawn

1/3 In an extract from her foreword to David Graeber’s new collection, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, Rebecca Solnit writes that Graeber:

‘wanted to put [ideas] in everyone’s hands … Which is part of why he worked hard at – and succeeded in – writing in a style that … was always as clear and accessible as possible, given the material. Egalitarianism is a prose style, too. … A sentence Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote about Hannah Arendt could apply equally well to him: “To fixate on her exceptional mind is to miss something that is important about her lessons in thinking: thinking is ordinary, she teaches; that is its secret power.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/07/david-graeber-optimistic-anarchist-rebecca-solnit

Yet isn’t this itself an example of not thinking, and instead of merely going along with received knowledge?

#humanities #anthropology #intellectual #accessible #difficulty #priviledge

‘It does not have to be this way’: the radical optimism of David Graeber

As a new collection of his writing is published, Rebecca Solnit remembers her friend, the late activist and anarchist who believed ordinary people had the power to change the world

The Guardian