History & society

Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari

A Brief History of Humankind

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  • 10 key ideas
  • Text
  • Published 2011

Introduction

Sapiens is Yuval Noah Harari's attempt to tell the story of the whole human species in one book, from the earliest people to the present day and on into a possible future. It has four parts: the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the Unification of Humankind and the Scientific Revolution, followed by a short afterword.

Harari argues that the thread running through all of it is imagination. People, he says, can believe in things that exist only in shared stories, such as money, countries, companies and rights, and that lets millions of strangers work together. He also keeps asking whether more power has actually made people happier.

A note for the reader: this is a very popular book that covers a huge span of time, and many historians and scientists dispute parts of it, for example how sudden the change in human thinking was, and whether early farming was really the step backward he describes. The ideas below report Harari's arguments as his own, not as settled fact.

  1. 1Harari argues that shared stories let Sapiens cooperate in huge numbers
  2. 2Harari calls the move to farming a trap for the individual
  3. 3Harari argues that big societies run on imagined orders, and that these orders carry hierarchies
  4. 4Harari calls money the most universal system of trust between strangers
  5. 5Harari argues that empires, not only wars, built the shared world we live in
  6. 6Harari presents universal religions as a third force that unites humankind
  7. 7Harari says history moves toward one world, but without a plan and with no proof it serves our good
  8. 8Harari says modern science began with admitting ignorance, then grew through ties to empire and capital
  9. 9Harari says modern growth runs on trust in the future, and that the state and market replaced family and community
  10. 10Harari asks whether more power has made people happier, and what we will do with the power to redesign ourselves

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Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari: summary | Daridanesh