Among historians there is a tiny subset who write, or have written about, cyclical patterns in human history—especially where the rise and fall of societies is concerned. Among the better known is Arnold Toynbee and his 12-volume work, A Study of History, which traces the development and decay of various civilizations in the historical record. And though the subject of societal collapse is more top of mind today than in the past, owing to the worrying state of the world, seldom do discussions around it place the phenomenon in a wider historical context. Indeed, the pursuit by cyclical pattern historians of what they might call “a science of history” is often deemed impossible by academics.  

Russian-American author and complexity scientist Peter Turchin makes the case that a science of history is not just possible, but also useful. His most recent book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration examines the complex interplay of socio-economic factors that, he asserts, repeatedly throw societies into decay, crisis, and often violent collapse. These patterns, he says, span the end of the Neolithic Period to the present day.

“Ever since the first complex societies organized as states appeared—roughly five thousand years ago—no matter how successful they might be for a while, eventually they all run into problems,” he writes. “All complex societies go through cycles of alternating stretches of internal peace and harmony periodically interrupted by outbreaks of internal warfare and discord.”

Turchin argues that the current political instability in the United States shares the same antecedents and causes as numerous other political crises in history that have ended in violent cataclysm. His thesis seems deceptively simple: when the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, conflict is all but inevitable. The United States, and some other Western countries, are far enough along in that process that greater turbulence—more violent days of reckoning—is imminent to him. His views on this subject have been prescient.

In 2010, the scientific journal Nature asked specialists from different fields to gaze into their crystal balls and prognosticate on the future. Turchin, who was asked to contribute, made the case that based on the patterns of US history, there would be a period of deeper political instability starting around 2020. The storming of the US Congress buildings by protestors a few months after the highly contested 2020 American presidential election seemingly validated Turchin’s prophecy. Political polarization in the US has been ramping up, evermore, since.

The point of Turchin’s historical modelling that seeks to identify existential political crises-in-the-making is not to create a flawless system of accurate prediction. He concedes this is impossible. Instead, it is to give the world a useful tool offering socio-economic indicators and trends which can augur trouble well in advance of those events. The intent is to give future societies opportunities to avert—or at least put-off for as long as possible—the civil wars, revolutions, and societal collapses that tend to afflict them with the resultant tragic destruction and loss of life.

Turchin’s Method: Cliodynamics

Turchin and his colleagues have been studying numerous political crises in history for decades using large amounts of data and analyzing them by computer. His focus has been on cycles of political integration and disintegration, particularly on state formation and collapse. His database, which he calls “CrisisDB” (DB standing for database), has yielded patterns in roughly 100 cases, out of 300, studied so far.

Turchin has coined a name for this field of work: “Cliodynamics”: from the word Clio, the name of the Greek mythological muse of history, and dynamics, the science of change. The approach combines the study of social and cultural evolution, historical macro-sociology, and economic history with the mathematical modelling of long-term social processes.

“It became clear to us through quantitative and qualitative historical analysis,” he writes, “that complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and, to a certain degree, predictable waves of political instability, brought about by the same basic set of forces, operating across the thousands of years of human history. It dawned on me some years ago that, assuming the patterns held, we were heading into the teeth of another storm.”

His Theory and Model

In End Times, Turchin writes that there are two main social forces which drive societies, time and again, into deep existential crises, and that dynamically interrelate.

The first is what he calls “popular immiseration.” This is a state of economic decline affecting most people, characterized by stagnating or declining real wages and a growing gap between rich and poor. When this occurs it is often accompanied by a “wealth pump”, which diverts the fruits of economic growth and enriches the elites at the expense of the poor, causing the social pyramid to grow top-heavy over time.

The second social force, related to the first, is “elite overproduction”. This is when good economic times and/or the wealth pump results in too many elites all vying for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business.

Elite overproduction time and again results in a glut of “frustrated elite aspirants”—

highly privileged individuals who feel excluded from existing power structures, or existing elites who want to rise higher. This can be a struggling corporate lawyer who dreams of wealth and power, a city mayor who wants to become a governor or congressperson, or a big-business person who aspires to political office.

When they find their way barred, or too difficult, they assume the posture of “counter-elites” by battling the establishment, and other fellow elites, for those fixed positions, often breaking the rules to succeed. Robespierre, Lenin and Castro are all examples.

All of this creates a highly volatile situation in which counter-elites can, and often do, channel the frustrations of the disgruntled masses, harnessing them to further their crusades, which leads to wider internal strife.

The United States entered this precise phase starting in the 1970s and early 80s when economic decline and neoliberal policies marked the end of the stability of long Post-War Consensus—with its cooperation between labour, capital and the state. Plutocrats and the super-rich have since greatly multiplied, and the number of university graduates has exceeded the system’s ability to absorb them into the job market. Immiseration has increased, and been made worse of late by waves of immigration that lower real wages for uneducated workers. The cheaper labour has resulted in more money entering the wealth pump that further empowers them, and enables elites to increase.

The challenge from “classic” counter-elite types like Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and JD Vance (the last of whom Turchin predicted would rise to the top of the counter-elite ranks when End Times was published in 2022), emboldened by support from the immiserated masses, has thrown the United States into a deeper polarization crisis.

“Together with popular immiseration, elite overproduction and the intraelite conflicts that it has engendered has gradually undermined our civic cohesiveness, the sense of national cooperation without which states quickly rot from within,” Turchin writes.

Beyond immiseration and elite overproduction, Turchin acknowledges that several other factors can contribute to, and tip the balance of, societal decline and collapse — including contagion and pandemics, climate disruptions, geopolitics, and ideological movements. But these are secondary factors which mostly exacerbate decline, he says.

Other Crises in History, and How They Tend to Unfold

Turchin cites other cases in the historical record which reveal this dynamic. The Taiping Rebellion in China in the mid-1800s, the late medieval collapse of France in the 14th century, and the United States Civil War in the 1860s—are all classic examples and the culminations of this very process.

Antebellum USA, prior to its civil war, bears a chilling resemblance, Turchin says, to the United States of today. That earlier period pitted the overproduced counter-elites in America’s industrialized north (who sought to impose their own political-economic model on the US) against southern cotton aristocrats during a period of widespread immiseration among the masses. The result of those dynamics was the tragic ruin that shattered the United States for a time, and which still reverberates to this day.

Turchin’s case studies reveal most crisis outcomes involve extreme violence. Seventy-five percent of all exits from crises resulted in civil wars, or revolutions, or both. Half of all cases showed major societal population loss. In nearly two-thirds, crises resulted in massive downward mobility from ranks of elites to commoners. And in 1/6 of cases, elites were targeted for extermination. The research is not encouraging.

What tends to unfold when a society enters its violent phase, Turchin writes, is that the ensuing loss of life and economic chaos results in conditions which can reset the cycle of collapse back to favourable conditions. The reduction of elites through either death, downward social mobility, or emigration, resolves issues of elite overproduction. Widespread death among the masses, and a dearth in labour supply and the freeing up of land that results, eases immiseration. Stability returns and the process begins anew.

It sometimes takes successive waves of conflict, sometimes skipping a generation, before things enter a lengthier period of stability that begins a new cycle of societal success and harmony.

Societies that Resolved their Crises: The Good News

In spite of the above statistics and outcomes, Turchin says, the historical record does “offer some examples of societies that managed to escape their crises relatively unscathed. Violence was minimal; sovereignty was maintained; there was little, if any, territorial loss, and most societal structures and institutions remained intact, excepting certain institutional or policy reforms. Somehow these societies managed to ‘flatten the curve’ of spiraling unrest and sectarian violence that engulfed so many others.”

Two notable examples Turchin cites are England in Chartist Period from 1819-1867, and Russia in its Reform Period from 1855-1881. In both cases, the ruling classes saw trouble coming from the agitated masses in advance. They wisely implemented reforms that reduced immiseration and curtailed the wealth pump that was inflating the ranks of the elite. The conditions of crisis were alleviated.

Interestingly, and perhaps more relevant, the early 20th century United States, like Russia and England above, also faced a mass insurrection or revolutionary situation, which it eventually defused. The same two factors, widespread immiseration and elite overproduction, were also in place. Riots, political violence and polarization involving communism, anarchism, immigration destabilization, and race conflicts were rife in the 1910s and 1920s. The ruling classes, seeing the writing on the wall, decided to act. In addition to immigration reform, they allowed for bargaining through unions and the creation of a minimum wage and social security during Progressive Era and New Deal periods, which set society on a new track away from crisis.

That ensuing period, also known later as “The Great Compression” was based on an implicit contract which promised that the fruits of economic growth (money that can be diverted by the wealth pump) would be distributed more equitably among workers and owners—in return for the boon of political stability and escape from revolution. Those policies curtailed immiseration among the white working class, limited the wealth pump to the elites, and stopped elite overproduction, which lasted until things began to change again in the 1970s.

“Typically, it takes a major perturbation to reduce wealth inequality, and this perturbation usually takes the form of a social revolution, a state collapse, a mass-mobilization war, or a major epidemic,” Turchin writes. “The Great Compression in America is one of the exceptional, hopeful cases… This reversal of the elite overproduction was similar in magnitude to the one that occurred in the aftermath of the Civil War, but it was accomplished through entirely nonviolent means. No social revolution did this; the ruling class did it itself – or, at least, it allowed a prosocial faction within itself to persuade the rest of the elites of the need for reforms.”

Whither America?

At present the United States finds itself in what Turchin calls its “third revolutionary situation.” How the crisis will be resolved—whether through some manner of armed civil conflict, a series of reforms, or a combination of both—will depend, he says, on whether the American ruling class can grasp the nature of the problem. End Times is Turchin’s attempt to bring the causes of the crisis to their attention.

However, our author is not optimistic in the very short-term. The wealth pump, Turchin believes, is so lucrative for the ruling elites, that it is inconceivable they’d reduce it on their own. Nonetheless, Turchin hopes that the patterns outlined in his research so far, and in the field of cliodynamics in the future, can prod elites to eventually make the types of decisions that will move their societies back from the brink. Though the best case exits from crises are never a permanent fix, if we had more information at our disposal to help us see crises coming, we might be able to effect more favourable outcomes—and less tragedy—than if we were to let history, and our actions, play out arbitrarily.

As Turchin writes in the closing lines of End Times:

“For the ruling class, there are two routes out of a revolutionary situation. One leads to their overthrow. The alternative is to adopt a series of reforms that will rebalance the social system, reversing the trends of popular immiseration and elite overproduction. The American ruling elites did it once, a century ago. Can they do it again?”