Historic recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history. The concept of historic recurrence has variously been applied to the overall history of the world (e.g., to the rises and falls of empires), to repetitive patterns in the history of a given polity, and to any two specific events which bear a striking similarity.
Hypothetically, in the extreme, the concept of historic recurrence assumes the form of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, which has been written about in various forms since antiquity and was described in the 19th century by Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nevertheless, while it is often remarked that "History repeats itself", in cycles of less than cosmological duration this cannot be strictly true.
In this interpretation of recurrence, as opposed perhaps to the Nietzschean interpretation, there is no metaphysics. Recurrences take place due to ascertainable circumstances and chains of causality. An example of the mechanism is the ubiquitous phenomenon of multiple independent discovery in science and technology, which has been described by Robert K. Merton and Harriet Zuckerman.
G.W. Trompf, in his book The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, traces historically recurring patterns of political thought and behavior in the west since antiquity. If history has lessons to impart, they are to be found par excellence in such recurring patterns.
Historic recurrences can sometimes induce a sense of "convergence", "resonance" or déjà vu. Three such examples appear under "Striking similarity".
Authors
Obamacarter: History Repeats Itself - A candidate who preaches hope and change. A mesmerized country. A disastrous presidency. History repeats itself.
Prior to the theory of historic recurrence that was offered by Polybius, a Greek Hellenistic historian (ca 200 â€" ca 118 BCE), ancient western thinkers who had thought about recurrence had largely been concerned with cosmological rather than historic recurrence.
Western philosophers and historians who have discussed various concepts of historic recurrence include Polybius, the Greek historian and rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BCE â€" after 7 BCE), Luke the Evangelist, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469â€"1527), Giambattista Vico (1668â€"1744), Arnold J. Toynbee (1889â€"1975).
An eastern concept that bears a kinship to western concepts of historic recurrence is the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven, by which an unjust ruler will lose the support of Heaven and be overthrown.
Paradigms
G.W. Trompf describes various historic paradigms of historic recurrence, including paradigms that view types of large-scale historic phenomena variously as "cyclical"; "fluctuant"; "reciprocal"; "re-enacted"; or "revived".
He also notes "[t]he view proceeding from a belief in the uniformity of human nature [Trompf's emphasis]. It holds that because human nature does not change, the same sort of events can recur at any time."
"Other minor cases of recurrence thinking," he writes, "include the isolation of any two specific events which bear a very striking similarity [his emphasis], and the preoccupation with parallelism [his emphasis], that is, with resemblances, both general and precise, between separate sets of historical phenomena."
Lessons
G.W. Trompf notes that most western concepts of historic recurrence imply that "the past teaches lessons for... future action"â€"that "the same... sorts of events which have happened before... will recur..."
One such recurring theme was early offered by Poseidonius (a Greek polymath, native to Apamea, Syria; ca 135â€"51 BCE), who argued that dissipation of the old Roman virtues had followed the removal of the Carthaginian challenge to Rome's supremacy in the Mediterranean world. The theme that civilizations flourish or fail according to their responses to the human and environmental challenges that they face, would be picked up two thousand years later by Toynbee.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BC â€" after 7 BC), while praising Rome at the expense of her predecessorsâ€"Assyria, Media, Persia, and Macedoniaâ€"anticipated Rome's eventual decay. He thus implied the idea of recurring decay in the history of world empiresâ€"an idea that was to be developed by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (1st century BCE) and by Pompeius Trogus, a 1st-century BCE Roman historian from a Celtic tribe in Gallia Narbonensis.
By the late 5th century, Zosimus (also called "Zosimus the Historian"; fl. 490sâ€"510s: a Byzantine historian who lived in Constantinople) could see the writing on the Roman wall, and asserted that empires fell due to internal disunity. He gave examples from the histories of Greece and Macedonia. In the case of each empire, growth had resulted from consolidation against an external enemy; Rome herself, in response to Hannibal's threat posed at Cannae, had risen to great-power status within a mere five decades. With Rome's world dominion, however, aristocracy had been supplanted by a monarchy, which in turn tended to decay into tyranny; after Augustus Caesar, good rulers had alternated with tyrannical ones. The Roman Empire, in its western and eastern sectors, had become a contending ground between contestants for power, while outside powers acquired an advantage. In Rome's decay, Zosimus saw history repeating itself in its general movements.
The ancients developed an enduring metaphor for a polity's evolution: they drew an analogy between an individual human's life cycle, and developments undergone by a body politic. This metaphor was offered, in varying iterations, by Cicero (106â€"43 BCE), Seneca (c. 1 BCE â€" 65 CE), Florus (c. 74 CE â€" ca 130 CE), and Ammianus Marcellinus (between 325 and 330 CE â€" after 391 CE). This social-organism metaphor would recur centuries later in the works of Émile Durkheim (1858â€"1917) and Herbert Spencer (1820â€"1903).
Niccolò Machiavelli, about to analyze the vicissitudes of Florentine and Italian politics between 1434 and 1494, described recurrent oscillations between "order" and "disorder" within states:
when states have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. In the same manner, having been reduced by disorder and sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend, and thus from good they gradually decline to evil and from evil mount up to good.
Machiavelli accounts for this oscillation by arguing that virtù (valor and political effectiveness) produces peace, peace brings idleness (ozio), idleness disorder, and disorder rovina (ruin). In turn, from rovina springs order, from order virtù, and from this, glory and good fortune.
Machiavelli, as had the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, saw human nature as remarkably stableâ€"steady enough for the formulation of rules of political behavior. Machiavelli wrote in his Discorsi:
Whoever considers the past and the present will readily observe that all cities and all peoples... ever have been animated by the same desires and the same passions; so that it is easy, by diligent study of the past, to foresee what is likely to happen in the future in any republic, and to apply those remedies that were used by the ancients, or not finding any that were employed by them, to devise new ones from the similarity of events.
The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana observed that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Which raises the question whether those who can remember are not doomed, anyway, to be swept along by the majority who cannot.
Karl Marx, having in mind the respective coups d'état of Napoleon I (1799) and his nephew Napoleon III (1851), wrote acerbically in 1852: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
Conversely, according to Canadian translator and writer Paul Wilson, the Polish public intellectual and former influential dissident Adam Michnik holds a "core... belief... that history is not just about the past because it is constantly recurring, and not as farce, as Marx had it, but as itself:
The world is full of inquisitors and heretics, liars and those lied to, terrorists and the terrorized. There is still someone dying at Thermopylae, someone drinking a glass of hemlock, someone crossing the Rubicon, someone drawing up a proscription list."
Similarities
One of the paradigms of recurrence thinking identified by G.W. Trompf involves "the isolation of any two specific events which bear a very striking similarity".
In his 1988 book, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age, Joshua S Goldstein suggests that empires, analogously to an individual's midlife crisis, experience a political midlife crisis. After a period of expansion in which all earlier goals are realised, overconfidence sets in. Regimes are then likely to attack or threaten their nearest rival. Goldstein cites four examples: the British Empire and the Crimean War; the German Second Reich and World War I; the USSR and the Cuban Missile Crisis; the United States and the Vietnam War.
Similarly, Gideon Rachman in 2010, Roland Benedikter in 2014, and Natalie Nougayrede in 2017, have all suggested that the European Union is suffering a midlife crisis.
The template for this behaviour was first explained by the Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun in his Muqadimmah (1377): new dynasties achieve social cohesion and "expand to the limit", but then become sedentary, wedded to luxury, and "subservient to desire".
In The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, David Hackett Fischer identified four waves, each of about 150-200 years' duration, in European history. Each wave begins with prosperity, leading to inflation, inequality, rebellion and war, and resolving in a long spell of equilibrium. For example, 18th-century inflation led to the Napoleonic wars and later the Victorian equilibrium.
Sir Arthur Keith's theory of the amity-enmity complex suggests that human conscience evolved as a duality; we are driven to protect members of our in-group, but also to hate and fight enemies who belong to an out-group. Thus an endless but useless cycle of ad hoc "isms" arises. We must learn to understand this phenomenon as being species-wide.
British novelist Martin Amis observes that recurring patterns of imperial ascendance-and-decline simultaneously are mirrored in, and inform, the novel:
[In an empire] novels seem to follow the political power. In the 19th century, when England ruled the earth, the novels were huge and all-embracing and tried to express what the whole society was. [This British "hegemony" waned with World War II and ended in the postwar years.] The English novel at that point was about 225 pages long and about career setbacks or marriage setbacks. [The "great tradition" increasingly looked depleted.] Uncannily, that power passed to the United States after the war, and [Americans such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and John Updike] started to write these huge novels.
[Amis draws a picture of Americans weighing the costs of "diminishing expectations" in the new millenium. The British had gradually accepted the decline and dissolution of their empire.] [T]he ideology [of] level-ism actually sweetened the pill of decline. It was saying, "You haven't got an empire anymore, but you shouldn't have had an empire in the first place. We don't like empires." It sort of soothed our brow. There's no great fury about decline in England. [Americans, Amis thinks, will react differently.] They're not going to be docile and stoic like we were. [The likely American reaction:] A fair amount of illusion.
See also
- Amity-enmity complex
- The Anatomy of Revolution
- Big Bang
- Big Bounce (pulsating-universe theory)
- Cliodynamics
- Dark (TV series)
- Eternal return
- Eureka: A Prose Poem, by Edgar Allan Poe, 1848 (Big Bang theory)
- Fractal
- Generation Zero
- List of multiple discoveries
- List of pre-modern great powers
- Multiple discovery
- Peter Turchin
- Philosophy of history
- Political midlife crisis
- Repetition, a related concept by Søren Kierkegaard
- The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
- State collapse
- Strauss-Howe generational theory
- The True Believer
Notes
References
- G.W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, from Antiquity to the Reformation, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979, ISBNÂ 0-520-03479-1.
- Arnold J. Toynbee, "Does History Repeat Itself?" Civilization on Trial, New York, Oxford University Press, 1948.
- Pitirim Aleksandrovich Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics: a Study of Change in Major Systems of Art, Truth, Ethics, Law, and Social Relationships, Boston, Porter Sargent Publishing, 1957, reprinted 1985 by Transaction Publishers.
- Gordon Graham, "Recurrence," The Shape of the Past, Oxford University Press, 1997, ISBNÂ 0-19-289255-X.
- Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Random House, 1987, ISBNÂ 0-394-54674-1.
- Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest, Penguin Press, 2011.
- Niall Ferguson, "America's 'Oh Sh*t!' Moment," Newsweek, November 7 & 14, 2011, pp. 36â€"39.
- Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, University of Chicago Press, 1973.
- Harriet Zuckerman, Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States, Free Press, 1979.
- David Lamb and S.M. Easton, Multiple Discovery: The Pattern of Scientific Progress, Amersham, Avebury Press, 1984.
- Sam Tanenhaus, "The Electroshock Novelist: The Alluring Bad Boy of Literary England Has Always Been Fascinated by Britain's Dustbin Empire. Now Martin Amis Takes On American Excess," Newsweek, July 2 & 9, 2012, pp. 50â€"53.
- David Christian (historian), Maps of Time: an Introduction to Big History, University of California Press, 2005.
- Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, new ed., W.W. Norton, 2005.
- Marshall G.S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Fred Spier, The Structure of Big History: from the Big Bang until Today, Amsterdam University Press, 1996.
- Andrey Korotayev, Arteny Malkov, Daria Khaltourina, Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends., Moscow, 2006, ISBNÂ 5-484-00559-0. See especially chapter 2.
- "StanisÅ‚aw zwany ze Szczepanowa" ("StanisÅ‚aw 'of Szczepanów'"), Encyklopedia Polski (Encyclopedia of Poland), Kraków, Wydawnictwo Ryszard KluszczyÅ„ski, 1996, pp. 636â€"37.
- "Becket, Saint Thomas à ," Encyclopedia Americana, Danbury, Connecticut, Grolier Incorporated, 1986, vol. 3, pp. 425â€"26.
- David Knowles, Archbishop Thomas Becket, 1949.
- George Bailey Sansom, A History of Japan to 1334, Stanford University Press, 1958.
- Francis Russell Hart, Admirals of the Caribbean, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1922.
- Neil Hanson, The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True History of the Spanish Armada, New York, Knopf, 2003, ISBNÂ 1-4000-4294-1.
- Garrett Mattingly, The Armada, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1959.
- C. Martin and G. Parker, The Spanish Armada, 1988.
- Bernard Grunberg, "La folle aventure d'Hernán Cortés" ("Hernán Cortés' Mad Adventure"), L'Histoire (History), no. 322 (Julyâ€"August 2007).
- William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 1843.
- Vanessa Collingridge, Captain Cook: The Life, Death and Legacy of History's Greatest Explorer, Ebury Press, 2003, ISBNÂ 0-09-188898-0.
- Ross Cordy, Exalted Sits the Chief: The Ancient History of Hawai'i Island, Mutual Publishing, 2000.
- Michael Dougherty, To Steal a Kingdom: Probing Hawaiian History, Waimanalo, Hawaii, Island Style Press, revised 4th printing, 1996.
- Paul Wilson, "Adam Michnik: A Hero of Our Time," The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 6 (April 2, 2015), pp. 73â€"75.