David Graeber, in his work on both anthropology and anarchism, has offered a very interesting critique of the idea of Western civilization as the birthplace of democracy. He has demonstrated that the West has been more of a collecting and integration of various ideas from other cultures, and in turn has changed those ideas like that of democracy. In non-Western and premodern cultures there has been numerous cases of direct democracy and using consensus in collective action, but the West has transformed that process into representative democracy that allows the formation of hierarchy. The final result has been that an idea of Western civilization has been used to pacify the truly revolutionary potential of democracy for the sake of a preexisting power structure.