And, like the Canadian populariser, he’s not afraid to take his audience on a digressive journey of discovery. Whether or not this vision of pre-agrarian life is an accurate one – and certainly the anthropology and archaeology on which Bregman draws are open to interpretation – the Dutchman puts together a compelling argument that society has been built on a false premise.īregman, whose previous book was the equally optimistic Utopia for Realists, has a Gladwellian gift for sifting through academic reports and finding anecdotal jewels. Then we discovered agriculture and for the next 10,000 years it was all property, war, greed and injustice.

He takes Rousseau’s intuition and paints a picture of a prelapsarian idyll in which, for the better part of 300,000 years, Homo sapiens lived a fulfilling life in harmony with nature and the community, bound only by the principles of humility and solidarity. Hobbes and Rousseau are seen as the two poles of the human nature argument and it’s no surprise that Bregman strongly sides with the Frenchman. He instead puts his faith in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century French thinker, who famously declared that man was born free and it was civilisation – with its coercive powers, social classes and restrictive laws – that put him in chains. But in following Hobbes, argues Bregman, we ensure that the negative view we have of human nature is reflected back at us.

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