The subtitle of the chapter, “Or, why this is not a book about the origins of inequality,” reveals its primary aim: to debunk prevailing ideas about human history that depend on either Thomas Hobbes’s assertion that life in premodern societies was “nasty, brutish, and short” or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s vision of human development as a fall from an innocent state of nature. The authors begin by pointing out that “[m]uch of human history is lost to us” (1), and that much of the current understanding about human history is based either on false evidence or no evidence at all.

As an anthropologist and an archeologist, the authors set out to provide evidence that will reveal that the conventional wisdom about the arc of human history—that agriculture and the rise of cities and states demanded a hierarchical system of government that leads to domination and an entrenched inequality—is simply not accurate. In fact, they argue, positing the question about why inequality exists only presupposes that there is nothing that can be done about it: “The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table” (7).