This refers to the capacity to imagine another’s point of view – the foundation of all caring and supportive social relations. The first was “imaginative identification”. Slide Anything shortcode error: A valid ID has not been providedįor Graeber, there were two kinds of imagination. It was his sense of wonder and intimate knowledge of how the imagination operates that helped shape his insights on topics as diverse as the nature of democracy, the origins of civilisation, and the meaning of value. Graeber’s commitment to the power of the imagination was a driving force behind his work and one of the reasons why it resonated with so many people. How did he do it? What insight allowed Graeber to capture the moment and articulate what so many felt but were afraid to think, let alone say? How did his work lead readers to a new understanding of democracy and the possibility of working together to change the world? And almost everyone seems to have heard of “bullshit jobs” without necessarily being able to name Graeber as the author of the 2013 essay that coined the term. Debt: The First 5,000 Years, published in 2011 while Graeber was active in the Occupy movement, has since become a touchstone for anyone interested in learning about economics. Written in the early 2000s, Graeber’s essays on the alter-globalisation movements circulated so widely in activist circles that they had been made into a clandestine compilation and translated into several different languages before he was able to print them as a book.

His insights on the imagination and the practice of democracy have inspired many not just to see the world differently, but to seek to change it.įor almost every important political moment in Western Europe and North America over the past 20 years, there was an article or book by David Graeber that could be said to have helped define it. David Graeber (1961-2020) was an American anthropologist, activist, and social movement intellectual.

David graeber's debt