The reviewer felt that the book paired well with Nikil Saval's book on the 'evolution of offices', Cubed, which followed the balance between office creativity and office rules. Hachard wrote that Graeber's points are 'almost always insightful, thought-provoking', and worthy of their 'serpentine' reasoning around topics including the history of philosophy, linguistics, and science-fiction films. Hachard wrote that Graeber's non-bureaucratic Occupy politics also undergirds the book's arguments. He noted the appearance of ' Baudrillard and bell hooks' and other academic language. Tomas Hachard wrote for NPR that the book is part academic and part radical politics. He argues that the 'order and regularity' of bureaucracy is more harmful than valuable, and elaborates that rules do not apply equally in practice and are more 'instruments through which the human imagination is smashed and shattered'. He makes an urgent call to remove the bureaucratic limits that hamper creativity. Graeber notes that Americans largely dislike bureaucracies, but while they are not motivated to change bureaucracies, he thinks they should be.

The book centers on the 'political implications' of bureaucracies and Graeber's solutions. Graeber argues that bureaucracies are no longer analyzed or satirized as they were in Catch-22 or The Castle. Graeber describes the contemporary era as the 'age of total bureaucratisation,' in which public and private bureaucracies, now so intertwined as to be effectively indistinguishable, have become the main mechanisms for Wall Street profits, and describes how bureaucratization brings the threat of violence (through legal and police enforcement) into almost every aspect of daily life in wealthy countries.

David graeber the first 5000 years