Event Type: HA

Takes Place: 16th October 2024

Time: 19.30

Venue: Online

Description: Based on research from his book, Humans: the 300,000-year struggle for equality Yuval Harari has offered the view that early humans, out of necessity, lived in egalitarian, peaceful societies that represented true civilisation, standing on its head the notion that early societies were primitive and unsophisticated. His claim, however, that an ‘agricultural revolution’ wiped clean the democratic, egalitarian ideals of hundreds of thousands of human experience has been challenged by David Graeber and David Wengrow, who point out that early agricultural societies maintained the value of foraging societies. They suggest that the creation of state-level societies was the real villain in destroying the truly human values of early societies. Humans: the 300,000-year struggle for equality, in turn, challenges both authors by maintaining that those early human values of egalitarianism have endured to the present day. If we shift our gaze from the ruling classes of society for the last 4,000 years to the masses whom they have controlled, we find constant efforts to overthrow slavery, feudal society and both capitalism and authoritarian versions of socialism. Both the extent and the successes of such bottom-up efforts, when we explore them, especially if we set aside Western ethnocentrism, change our view of human history and particular events. And so, for example, we find that democratic, egalitarian structures remained intact in agricultural African societies until the European scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century, and that a number of post-colonial African societies worked to restore such structures in the post-colonial period only to find their efforts subverted by neo-colonialism. Alvin Finkel is one of Canada’s best known and most prolific historians. Author, co-author or co-editor of 14 books, he specialises in labour history and the history of social policy. He is co-author of the two-volume History of the Canadian Peoples, whose seven editions have been the best-selling Canadian history survey texts for three decades. His Social Policy and Practice in Canada: a history has prevailed as the standard text in Canadian social policy in both history and social work departments in Canada for almost two decades. It encouraged Dr Finkel to produce a global work, entitled Compassion: a global history of social policy (published by Macmillan in 2018). Dr Finkel was a founding member of the Alberta Labour History Institute in 1999 and has been its president since 2016. In that role, he became editor and principal author of Working People in Alberta: a history, a book issued during the centennial years of the Alberta Federation of Labour (2012). Dr Finkel was a history professor for over 40 years, including 36 years with Athabasca University, where he was the first historian to be hired.

How to book: Book via Zoom link below

Price: Free & open to all. Recordings of talk will be available to HA members.

Website: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_yx-YoKE9SkCjPh9dEVN_fw

Organiser: HA