A review by eholtzman217
The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

challenging hopeful informative medium-paced

4.0

David Graeber is one of my favorite nonfiction authors and this books was a pleasant surprise! I wasn’t sure what to expect because it seemed it may be very different from his more impersonal anthropological works. The second half of the book turned out to be quite similar to those books, but my favorite part was Chapter 2, in which he detailed a lot of the on-the-ground experiences he had before and during Occupy Wall Street. I was in seventh grade at the time, and mired in my hometown’s politics, so it’s utterly fascinating to hear about OWS from a completely opposite and significantly more informed perspective. I do think Graeber does a great job making anarchism sound powerful and meaningful on the local level, but i dislike the way he poo-poos the questions of how to scale it and how X, Y, or Z would work under anarchism. He responds, “did Florentine merchants plan how the stock exchange would work? No,” but it’s completely different because we already have certain technologies — it’s normal to ask what might happen to them under a different system. If these questions are outside the scope of the book, it’s fine to just say so rather than act like they’re bad questions that no true Scotsman would ask. Still, the book was overall really interesting and eye-opening, and gave me a new perspective on the OWS movement.