The origins of human freedom, as we imagine them, are strange. In the Western tradition, freedom was won by warriors breaking free from the constraints of political rule and domestic conformity. Against the authority of the state and the bonds of kinship and household, the warrior establishes liberty through transgression and conquest. Warriors, like a wolf-pack, form bonds beyond immediate kinship and set out to find freedom through competition and conflict. From this primordial struggle, the story goes, freedom consolidates into modern political norms and institutions. Yet this tradition also tells a bleaker version of the same narrative, in reverse: that agriculture and urbanization didn’t consolidate freedom, but destroyed it. Private property, hierarchy, and the state made everything that followed a long retreat from an original condition of simple liberty. Whether the story runs forward or backward, it is conceived as a struggle against domination, individually heroic, and exercised necessarily at someone else’s expense. This, at least, is one conception of freedom taken for granted across much of Western political thought.

In his two-part Tanner Lecture on Human Values, The Elementary Forms of Human Freedom, archaeologist David Wengrow challenges assumptions about freedom’s origin and nature. Part 1, “Enlightenment without Books,” was delivered on March 24 at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts; Part 2, “Like a Nightmare Upon the Brain of the Living,” followed on March 25 in the Tanner Humanities Center’s Jewel Box, as part of a symposium. Wengrow is Professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College London. His recent book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, co-written with the late David Graeber, revises assumptions about human social evolution, freedom, and inequality.

Across both lectures, Wengrow offered a paradigm of freedom not as heroic resistance alone, but as a set of social capacities visible across human history.

As counter-evidence to the dominant stories of freedom, Wengrow offers evidence from early Indigenous Australian, Native American, and Indian Ocean cultures. Some of this evidence comes from recent archaeological findings about migration and social organization, rather than written records. Just as importantly, the story of the Europeans’ encounter with Native North America provided an image of freedom foundational to Western political theory. Jesuit missionaries like Gabriel Sagard—whose 1632 account of the Wendat influenced both John Locke and Voltaire—marveled at societies where chiefs governed by consent and persuasion rather than force, women controlled agricultural resources and could divorce at will, children were raised through affection rather than punishment, and public affairs were conducted through open, inclusive debate. Wengrow argues that this style of rational, empirical, and convivial argument—visible in the daily councils of the longhouse—was not merely observed by Enlightenment thinkers but absorbed by them. Political ideals that Europeans came to call their own owe more to the indigenous Americas than is commonly acknowledged in standard accounts of the Enlightenment public sphere.

For Wengrow, these examples demonstrate a concise but compelling set of criteria for human freedom: the ability to move away from one’s given social context; to disobey arbitrary commands; and to create new forms of social organization or move between existing ones. This definition enables straightforward comparison across societies or their parts, and suggests that freedom is always a conscious social arrangement, rather than a naive state of nature. This is an older history than political theory recognizes, Wengrow insists, because the capacity for such reflection necessary to freedom is not new: the human brain has been much the same for 200,000–300,000 years.

In the Q&A after the main lecture on March 24 at the UMFA, the discussion addressed distorted and patronizing views of early homo sapiens across disciplines, as well as the potential inescapability of the wolf-pack dynamic. A final question asked why we couldn’t look to smaller, local narratives rather than grand ones—the paradigm known as “history from below.” Wengrow’s reply was brief: “Why can’t we have a big history from below up?”

In his second lecture on March 25, Wengrow presented more specialized findings, including Christopher Boehm's research on reverse-dominance hierarchies. Boehm’s work shows that the capacity to collectively resist bullying is documented across both foraging and agricultural societies with similar frequency. He also offered a revised reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s parable of the three metamorphoses in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: from camel to lion to child. This parable, Wengrow observed, maps neatly onto his three elementary freedoms: to move away, to disobey, and to create something new. But crucially, each transformation in that account involves a shrinkage of scale, ending in a single Promethean individual. Wengrow ended by noting the parable’s ambivalence for theorizing freedom.

The symposium featured speakers from the University of Utah and invited scholars, each of whom took up Wengrow’s framework from a different archive, region, or disciplinary perspective:

In her talk, “Seeing Freedom Archaeologically,” Rosemary Joyce (University of California, Berkeley) argued that archaeological evidence from the Ulúa region of Honduras is better read through freedom rather than inequality. The region’s artworks point not to command but to persuasion and collective participation, and the region’s distributed settlement pattern reflects dynamic movement rather than static, bounded communities.

In “Community: An Andean History,” Rohan Chatterjee (University of Utah) explored how the word “community” became a legal category in Peru only in the twentieth century, when it was codified in the 1920 Constitution. Yet community is routinely used as a transhistorical term for Indigenous social organization. Using title records stretching back to the 1540s, he showed how the same place had been designated successively as an ayllu, a reducción, an aldea, and only finally as a “community.” He urged skepticism toward treating the term as natural or affirming.

In his talk, “Personhood, Self-Realization, and Imaginaries of Freedom in the Oyo Empire,” Akinwumi Ogundiran (Northwestern University) argued that over a thousand years of Yoruba history, freedom was not conceived in abstract or individual terms, but through interlocking frameworks of personhood, self-realization, community building, and interdependence. Drawing on archaeological evidence from the Oyo colonial site of Ede-Ile, he explored how the empire’s integration into Atlantic trade, including enslavement, forced acute questions about personhood. In the region, a horse could be worth more than two enslaved adults. These contradictions are compounded by the empire’s decentralized monarchy and corporate citizenship.

In “Silencing the Past: The Civil War as America’s Slave Revolution,” Eric Herschthal (University of Utah) argued that the American Civil War should be recognized as a slave revolution comparable to the Haitian Revolution. He also argued that historians had resisted this framing in three ways: overemphasizing self-emancipation at the expense of pragmatic political alliance; a disciplinary aversion to military history; and mischaracterizing Reconstruction as a broad national commitment to interracial democracy, rather than as the partially realized demands of a slave revolution. White Northern Republicans, he suggested, embraced those demands primarily out of strategic self-interest. In making these interventions, Herschthal pressed for historians’ recognition of enslaved people’s own political savvy and insight.

In his talk, “Freedom, Liberation or Emancipation? A Reflective Query,” Anthony Bogues (Brown University) examined liberty, emancipation, and freedom as distinct concepts with different relationships to the experience of enslaved and colonized people. He further argued that racial slavery involved double commodification: the enslaved person becomes both a commodity and a producer of commodities. Bogues suggested that this negation is distinct from Marx’s account of alienated labor.

In her talk, “Feminist Freedom: Jane’s Practice of Anarchic Direct Action and Mutual Aid,” Ella Myers (University of Utah) presented the feminist abortion collective Jane, which operated in Chicago between 1969 and 1973 and performed abortions outside legal or medical authorization. Myers suggested that Jane enacted Wengrow’s third elementary form of freedom: the freedom to create new social relationships. She distinguished Jane’s activism from conventional direct action, which aims to pressure the state to change, and aligned it instead with anarchic direct action: unmediated and reflexive, aimed at changing the conditions of those carrying it out, rather than appealing to authorities. 

Robert Carson
Associate Director, Tanner Humanities Center

About the Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Founded by Grace and Obert Tanner in the mid-1970s, the Tanner Lectures are dedicated to enriching the intellectual and moral life of humankind. Annual Tanner Lectures are delivered at nine universities: Stanford, Berkeley, Utah, Michigan, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge. More information at tannerlectures.org.

Views expressed in Tanner Humanities Center events do not reflect the official views of the Center or the University of Utah.