[astine]

Sapiens is a big "picture human history" book, which is a genre which is always going to have a number of weaknesses due to the problems of trying to squelch all of human history into a single readable book with a clear thesis. The quote about the French Revolution is indeed pretty bad as a literal description of what happened during the revolution, (though I understand what he is getting at when he says it.) However, I don't think that this analysis is quite fair to Harari.

His main criticism is of Harari's "shared fiction" concept and it seems to me that he misses the point of the concept. Harari is pointing out a category of thing that really does exist in the real world, but only exists because people agree on some level to recognize its existence. Corporations (to use Harari's example) are indeed real, but they exist only because people agree they exist. If people refused to believe in IBM, for example, it would cease to exist.

I don't know if Harari is correct that this ability to embrace social realities actually constitutes a "cognitive revolution" that allowed homo sapiens to surpass other human species in a dramatic way, but I do think that it is certainly different from our ability create a word for "rock" and thereby reify rocks into existence. There's a difference between being able to create arbitrary categories for material objects in the world and being able to recognize a new category of thing through shared acceptance. I don't think that the latter is simply a consequence of our ability to use language.

Also, it's important to note that that critique is being offered by a historian but the core of the critique is philosophical (or maybe linguistic) not historical. I think the best criticism I've seen of Sapiens is that the author is a historian trying to write anthropology, but this critique of that anthropology book is also by an historian so it has the same weakness.