Ishmael

[Abbigail]

Has anyone read this? If so I'd love to discuss it.

It's an AMAZING book!

[BreadBros]

I read it a few years ago. I thought it was fairly well-written and extremely interesting. I loved it because it has a material analysis of history, which at the time was one of the first I had read. However, ultimately it comes a primitivist conclusion, that hierarchical society can only be done away with if we regress back into hunter-and-gatherer groups. There are various problems with this view in my opinion, primarily the idea that the development of agriculture is something inherently unnatural or some kind of particular historical anomaly that happened. In reality it was a slow and gradual process that had deep roots and was in many ways unavoidable, so I doubt a new primitivist society could avoid it either. What did you think of the ideas in it?