Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) is an Israeli historian, philosopher, and public intellectual. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in world history.
Work Appearing in This Wiki
- harari-2018-21-lessons — 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018): essays on technological disruption, political fragmentation, truth, and resilience in the present moment
Major Works
| Book | Year | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind | 2011 (Hebrew), 2014 (English) | Deep human history: cognitive revolution to the present |
| Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow | 2015 (Hebrew), 2017 (English) | Long-arc futures: dataism, AI, human upgrade |
| 21 Lessons for the 21st Century | 2018 | Present challenges: technology, politics, truth, resilience |
The trilogy is structured as: past → future → present.
Signature Ideas
- Cognitive Revolution (Sapiens): humans uniquely share fictions (myths, religions, nations, money), enabling large-scale cooperation
- Dataism (Homo Deus): data processing as the new supreme value; risk that humans become irrelevant to information-processing systems
- Clarity in information overload (21 Lessons): in a world deluged by irrelevant information, the ability to understand what is actually happening is power
- Learning to learn (21 Lessons): education must cultivate adaptability, not specific knowledge, because the pace of change makes knowledge obsolete
Public Profile
Harari is one of the most widely read non-fiction authors of the 2010s–2020s: Sapiens alone sold >20 million copies in 40+ languages. He advises heads of state and speaks regularly at Davos and similar forums. He practises Vipassana meditation (10-day silent retreats annually) and credits it as his primary method for observing his own mind — discussed in 21 Lessons Chapter 21.