Anthropologist, intellectual leader of Occupy Wall St.

David Graeber, an anthropologist and self- proclaimed anarchist who was an intellectual leader of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and wrote books challenging established views about jobs, wealth and social hierarchies, died Wednesday at a hospital in Venice. He was 59.

His wife, Nika Dubrovsky, tweeted that he died while on vacation. The immediate cause was internal bleeding from an unknown underlying cause.

Mr. Graeber was both a scholar of anarchism — technically, a society without a form of government — and an advocate of it.

A onetime professor at Yale University — where his teaching contract was not renewed in 2005, sparking a public outcry — Mr. Graeber later had a distinguished academic career in England, most recently as a professor at the London School of Economics. His articles were downloaded millions of times, and his books became best- sellers.

“It’s possible,” the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote in 2012, “that, given his activism and his writings, he is the most influential anthropologist in the world.”

In 2011, Mr. Graeber became a major voice in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began as grassroots opposition to income inequality and corporate power. He helped coin the movement’s catchy slogan, “We are the 99%,” as a way to highlight the vast amount of wealth controlled by the richest 1% of the population.

More crucially, he helped lead a meeting in which it was determined that the movement’s decisions would be made by consensus. It was a core principle of anarchism, which Mr. Graeber saw as a form of cooperative self- government, not as a lawless society.

In April, Mr. Graeber married Ms. Dubrovsky, an artist. A complete list of his survivors could not be confirmed.