Graeber signed a book deal with Melville House toward the end of 2014, and The Utopia of Rules was released on February 24, 2015.

[3] 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.

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".

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.

[1] The book's questions prompted the theme of the 2016 Taipei Biennial, in which artists produced work on how institutional bureaucracies structure human imagination.