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������Ƶ welcomed archaeologist David Wengrow for their termly Essay Society. This term's theme was Movement: three speakers tackled a wide range of issues. David Wengrow discussed the evolution of human freedom, pondering: 

'Strangely, most histories of freedom say very little about people acting in ways that might be considered free. More often, they are histories of legal and theoretical debates about the meaning of the word "freedom.” What would happen to our picture of world history, and our sense of human possibilities, if we defined freedom in terms of practice, not theory?' 

The NC Essay Society, established in 1868, has a long history of eminent speakers, with the likes of Isaiah Berlin, Tony Benn, and H.L.A. Hart all having been associated with the society over the last 155 years. The society aims to promote interdisciplinary thinking and for current students to explore ideas outside of their degree subject. Guest speakers are invited from a range of fields and each meeting has a broad theme which allows students and guest speakers to interpret as they wish. Recent meetings include: “Lies and Liars”, “The World’s a Stage”, "Whose Story", “Perspective". In the last two years, we have hosted a Supreme Court judge, a playwright, a political theorist, a historian, and a theatre director. 

David Wengrow is Professor of Archaeology at UCL, most famous for co-writing The Dawn of Everything (2021) with the late David Graeber. This groundbreaking book draws on new archaeological evidence to overturn conventional wisdom about human evolution and the formation of political communities. Describing the diversity of early human societies, the book critiques traditional narratives of history’s linear development from primitivism to civilisation.  Instead, The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia. This clashes with social contract theorists (e.g. Hobbes, Rousseau) who claim a single process of societal formation, which modern thinkers e.g. Yuval Noah Harari, Francis Fukuyama, have presented as well.