Welcome to Cliodynamica, Peter Turchin’s Substack about our past, present, and possible futures as viewed through the lens of Cliodynamics (scroll down to learn about Cliodynamics).
Peter Turchin
I grew up in the Soviet Union—a country that doesn’t exist any more. When I was 20 years old, my family moved to America, because my father, a scientist and dissident, was expelled from the Soviet Union.
I began my academic career in the 1980s as an ecologist; I made my living studying the population dynamics of beetles, butterflies, mice, and deer. This was the time when animal ecology was revolutionized by the rapid growth in the processing power of computers. I always liked mathematics, so I embraced the turn of the field to complexity science, which merges computer modeling with big data analytics to answer such questions as, for example, why many animal populations go through boom-and-bust cycles. By the late 1990s, however, I felt we’d answered most of the interesting questions I’d entered the field to work on. I began to consider how the same complexity-science approach could be brought to the study of human societies, both in the past and today. And that’s how I turned to Cliodynamics.
Cliodynamics
“History is not just one damn thing after another,” the historian Arnold Toynbee once retorted to a critic. But Toynbee was a far outlier in his profession. For a long time, historians and philosophers, including famous ones like Karl Popper, insisted that a science of history was impossible. Our societies are too complex, humans are too self-willed, scientific progress cannot be predicted, and culture is too variable in space and time. The Inca Empire is completely different from Ming China, and antebellum America tells us nothing about the America of the 2020s. This has been, and still largely is, the majority view.
I think that this view is wrong. A science of history is not only possible but is also needed: it helps us anticipate how the collective choices we make in the present can bring us a better future. My colleagues and I call such history-as-science Cliodynamics (from Clio, the name of the Greek muse of history, and dynamics, the science of change).
Empires rise and fall, populations and economies boom and bust, world religions spread or wither… but what are the mechanisms underlying such dynamical processes in history? Are there “laws of history”?
We do not lack hypotheses to investigate—to take just one example, more than two hundred explanations have been proposed for why the Roman Empire fell. But we still don’t know which of these hypotheses are plausible, and which should be rejected. More importantly, there is no consensus on what general mechanisms explain imperial breakdown. What is needed is a systematic application of the scientific method to history: verbal theories should be translated into mathematical models, precise predictions derived, and then rigorously tested on empirical material. In short, history needs to become an analytical, predictive science. Cliodynamics, thus, is the new transdisciplinary area of research at the intersection of historical macrosociology, economic history/cliometrics, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases.
Two Big Questions
Over the past 10,000 years, human societies have evolved from small-scale, relatively egalitarian groups to complex, large-scale societies characterized by great differentials in wealth and power, extensive division of labor, and elaborate governance structures. There are many theories attempting to explain this major evolutionary transition. Which are correct?
Complex human societies, organized as states, have been around for 5,000 years. For a while, they can experience periods of high internal peace and order, roughly a century long, but inevitably they eventually enter periods of high social unrest and political disintegration—End Times. Why?
These general questions have motivated my research for the past quarter-century. You can find extended treatments in the three non-technical books I’ve written:
War and Peace and War (2007) sets up the general conceptual framework for thinking about both questions, discusses many existing explanations, and advances a new theory (which has well withstood the test of time).
Ultrasociety (2015) delves into the first question, proposing a new theory, stemming from cultural evolution, that explains why the social scale and complexity of human societies increased by (literally) many orders of magnitude during the past ten millennia.
End Times (2023) focuses on why human societies cannot enjoy internal peace for long and, seemingly inevitably, eventually slide into crisis.
You can find more information about my academic affiliations and research news on my site, peterturchin.com. There I post links to my academic publications, non-technical popular articles, and books.
About This Substack
For many years, my blog of the same name (Cliodynamica) was housed on my web site. There are two reasons why I decided to move it to Substack.
First, Substack promises to increase the reach of my writings by connecting me to (hopefully) millions of potential readers, as well as other Substack writers.
Second, I find the economic model of Substack quite attractive. The overhead it imposes is reasonable, and I get to keep the rights to the texts I write. Unlike most Substack writers, I am financially secure and don’t need the money for myself. Instead, revenues from paid subscriptions will go to support my research team.
Over the four decades of my academic career I’ve been quite successful in obtaining research funds from a variety of organizations, public and private, as well as from individual benefactors. But with every year the success rate of research proposals we submit for funding has been declining. Public funding for science, especially in the US, is in the free fall, while the number of applicants is swelling (yes, elite overproduction!). It has become particularly difficult to get funding for transdisciplinary science, as each scientific field circles the wagons in an attempt to preserve its disciplinary core.
One particular research direction that has been exceedingly difficult to fund is an investigation into how societies can exit crisis periods without much bloodshed. Now that it is generally accepted that the United States is in revolution and the European Union has entered a period of heightened social and political turbulence, one might think that answering such a question would be assigned high priority by science funders. Not so. Two years ago we published a research paper explaining what needs to be done: Empirically Testing and Refining Structural Demographic Theory: A Methodological Guide, but so far there has been no takers.
Thus, a major motivation for me in starting a Substack is to see whether we can circumvent the sclerotic funding structures in academia by an appeal to the general public—which means you, the readers. The more of you upgrade to paid subscriptions, the more funds will become available to support researchers in my team, and the faster will be the progress in determining how we collectively can choose a better future.
A final note. The opinions I express here (and in all of my writings, in fact) are strictly non-partisan and non-ideological. My main interest is to go where science leads. Ideological thinking is different from science in that in science data triumph over theories. Ideologues, on the other hand, ignore or twist facts to suit their theoretical predispositions. Thus, don’t expect me to endorse someone or something, nor to assign blame. Before we decide what the world should be (and agree on how to get there), we need to understand what it is.
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