> Skip to content
  • Published: 15 March 2015
  • ISBN: 9781612193748
  • Imprint: Melville House
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $49.99

The Utopia of Rules

On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy




A follow-up to David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms?

To answer these questions, anthropologist David Graeber—one of the most prominent and provocative thinkers working today—takes a journey through ancient and modern history to trace the peculiar and fascinating evolution of bureaucracy over the ages.

He starts in the ancient world, looking at how early civilizations were organized and what traces early bureaucratic systems have left in the ethnographic literature. He then jets forward to the nineteenth century, where systems we can easily recognize as modern bureaucracies come into being. In some areas of life—like with the modern postal systems of Germany and France—these bureaucracies have brought tremendous efficiencies to modern life. But Graeber argues that there is a much darker side to modern bureaucracy that is rarely ever discussed. Indeed, in our own “utopia of rules,” freedom and technological innovation are often the casualties of systems that we only faintly understand.

Provocative and timely, the book is a powerful look and history of bureaucracy over the ages and its power in shaping the world of ideas.

  • Published: 15 March 2015
  • ISBN: 9781612193748
  • Imprint: Melville House
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $49.99

About the author

David Graeber

David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts helped to make Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on 2 September 2020.

Also by David Graeber

See all

Praise for The Utopia of Rules

Praise for Debt: The First 5,000 Years: “Written in a brash, engaging style, the book is also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of debt—where it came from and how it evolved.” —The New York Times Book Review “An absolutely indispensable—and enormous—treatise on the history of money and its relationship to inequality in society.” —Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing “[A]n engaging book. Part anthropological history and part provocative political argument, it’s a useful corrective to what passes for contemporary conversation about debt and the economy.” —Jesse Singal, Boston Globe “This timely and accessible book would appeal to any reader interested in the past and present culture surrounding debt, as well as broad-minded economists.” —Library Journal