Graeber / Wengrow 17: "The idea that our current ideals of freedom, equality and democracy are somehow products of the 'Western tradition' would in fact have come as an enormous surprise to someone like Voltaire"
"the Enlightenment thinkers who propounded such ideals almost invariably put them in the mouths of foreigners, even 'savages' like the Yanomami. This is hardly surprising, since it's almost impossible to find a single author in that Western tradition, from Plato to Marcus Aurelius to Erasmus, who did not make it clear that they would have been opposed to such ideas. The word 'democracy' might have been invented in Europe (barely, since Greece at the time was much closer culturally to North Africa and the Middle East than it was to, say, England) but it's almost impossible to find a single European author before the nineteenth century who suggested it would be anything other than a terrible form of government"
31: "indigenous Americans -- confronted with strange foreigners -- gradually developed their own, surprisingly consistent critique of European institutions, but [...] these critiques came to be taken very seriously in Europe itself"
rephrased 482: "indigenous doctrines of individual liberty, mutual aid, and political equality [made a powerful] impression on French Enlightenment thinkers"
530, in endnote: "The framers of the US Constitution, for example, were quite explicitly anti-democratic and made clear in their own public statements that they designed the Federal Government in large part to head off the risk of 'democracy' breaking out in one of the former colonies (they were particularly worried about Pennyslvania). Meanwhile, actual direct democratic decision-making had been practised regularly in various parts of Africa or Amazonia, or for that matter in Russian or French peasant assemblies, for thousands of years" (see Graeber 2007b)
"Why then insist that all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as 'the white race' (and now, generally, call themselves by its more accepted synonym, 'Western civilization')? [...] It would be just as easy (actually, rather easier) to identify things that can be interpreted as the first stirrings of rationalism, legality, deliberative democracy and so forth all over the world, and only then tell the story of how they coalesced into the current global system"