Sapiens is perhaps the best-known popular press work in a new academic field called Big History - an attempt to survey broad swathes of history, perhaps even to quantify it and study it with historical rigor. Harari sets for himself the rather daunting task of surveying all of human history in five hundred pages and change. Does he succeed?

I suppose it depends on what success looks like! If the idea is to make the point that history is subject to such an approach in the first place, that it’s possible to be a commercial success with such an outlandish mission statement… then sure, I guess that’s success. I would even venture to say that Harari succeeded in illuminating some interesting comparisons across the ages, such as the notion that the deities which ruled Fertile Crescent city-states acted in many ways like today’s corporations. The notion that the development of agriculture was a fool’s bargain, and so were all of the technologies which followed in its wake, is not exactly new but certainly eye-opening and worth considering. (Though it seems to me that Harari carries the argument off with a needless helping of foolishly romantic, fictional prose about hunter-gatherers.)

The whole text is shot through with an axe to grind, and not a very subtle one, which is what ultimately makes it a failure. I think the Big Historians style themselves as an entirely new breed of academics, but it seems to me they are really just re-discovering the trail blazed by Marx long ago. Sure, there is a different ideology at play: Harari is an anti-humanist, who writes with somewhat more erudition and verve than the high school sophomore who just finished skimming Atlas Shrugged. But it’s not clear to me that he adds a whole lot to the conversation which Marx did not add 150-some years ago.

What’s worse is that Big Historians have such a sharp inferiority complex with regards to their colleagues in the sciences. That leads Harari to write that physics is the history of the universe, biology is the history of life, etc. It’s all cute and glib until Harari starts to opine about the sciences, and he does not appear particularly well-versed in them; in fact he seems to reify long-discredited scientific theories because they happen to fit in nicely with well-established historical argumentation.

The footnotes are illuminating! In one section Harari makes an outlandish claim drawn from the depths of outright junk evolutionary psychology and bolsters it with a fairly pedestrian retelling of the 1989 coup that took down long-time Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. The section on Ceaușescu is richly footnoted - I think there were about a dozen sources, because of course this episode in history was richly documented. It happened in broad daylight during the modern era, and on TV no less. The impossibly strong claim based in junk science, however, rested on a single citation, a study that demonstrates conclusively that monkeys like grapes. It’s just one small piece of the book as a whole, and I only noticed it because I find claims in evolutionary psychology to be so insanely repulsive - but I can’t say it gave me a lot of respect for Harari’s treatment of archaeology, evolutionary history, and similar topics at the edge of “traditional” history.

On the whole I found the book pretty interesting, but it was a little suffocating to get through all of the ideological and pseudo-scientific junk masquerading as rigorous academic work.