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commented on The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber

David Graeber, David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything (Hardcover, 2021, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 3 stars

The renowned activist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with the professor of comparative …

"Even if you shoot the trespassers yourself, you still need others to agree you were within your rights to do so. In other words, ‘landed property’ is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. In fact, land ownership illustrates perfectly the logic of what Rudolf von Ihering called the state’s monopoly of violence within a territory — just within a much smaller territory than a nation state."