Historic recurrence

Mark Twain: "a favorite theory of mine—to wit, that no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often."^[1]

Polybius

Historic recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history.^[2] 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.^[3]

Poseidonius

Dionysius of Halicarnassus

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^[4] and Friedrich Nietzsche.^[5]

Nevertheless, while it is often remarked that "History repeats itself," in cycles of less than cosmological duration this cannot be strictly true.^[6]

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.^[7] 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.^[8] 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.^[9] Three such examples appear under "Striking similarity."

Authors

Prior to the theory of historic recurrence that was offered by Polybius, a Greek Hellenistic historian (ca 200 – ca 118 BCE), ancient western thinkers who had thought about recurrence had largely been concerned with cosmological rather than historic recurrence.^[10]

Western philosophers and historians who have discussed various concepts of historic recurrence include Polybius, the Greek historian and rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus (ca. 60 BCE – after 7 BCE), Saint Luke, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975).^[3]

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.^[11]

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".^[12]

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."^[13]

"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."^[14]

Lessons

Cicero

Seneca

Niccolò Machiavelli

Giambattista Vico

George Santayana

Arnold J. Toynbee

Adam Michnik

G.W. Trompf notes that most western concepts of historic recurrence imply that "the past teaches lessons for... future action" — that "the same... sorts of events which have happened before... will recur..."^[15]

One such recurring theme was early offered by Poseidonius (a Greek polymath, native to Apamea, Syria; ca 135–51 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.^[16] 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.^[17]

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, while praising Rome at the expense of her predecessors^[18] — Assyria, Media, Persia, and Macedonia — anticipated Rome's eventual decay. He thus implied the idea of recurring decay in the history of world empires — 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.^[19]

By the late 5th century, Zosimus (also called "Zosimus the Historian"; fl. 490s–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.^[20]

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 (106–43 BCE), Seneca (ca. 1 BCE – 65 CE), Florus (ca 74 CE – ca 130 CE), and Ammianus Marcellinus (between 325 and 330 CE – after 391 CE).^[21] This social-organism metaphor would recur centuries later in the works of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).

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.^[22]

Machiavelli, as had the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, saw human nature as remarkably stable—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.^[23]

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana observed that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."^[24] 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."^[25]

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."^[26]

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".^[15]

British novelist Martin Amis observes that recurring patterns of imperial ascendance-and-decline simultaneously are mirrored in, and inform, the novel:

Martin Amis

[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.^[27]

[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.^[28]

Quotations

• “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” — André Gide

See also

• Cliodynamics
• Eternal return
• Fractal
• List of multiple discoveries
• List of pre-modern great powers
• Multiple discovery
• Repetition, a related concept by Søren Kierkegaard
• The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Notes

References

• G.W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, from Antiquity to the Reformation, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979, ISBN 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, ISBN 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, ISBN 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. 36–39.
• 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. 50–53.
• 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, ISBN 5-484-00559-0. See especially chapter 2.
• "Stanisław zwany ze Szczepanowa" ("Stanisław 'of Szczepanów'"), Encyklopedia Polski (Encyclopedia of Poland), Kraków, Wydawnictwo Ryszard Kluszczyński, 1996, pp. 636–37.
• "Becket, Saint Thomas à," Encyclopedia Americana, Danbury, Connecticut, Grolier Incorporated, 1986, vol. 3, pp. 425–26.
• 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, ISBN 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 (July–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, ISBN 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. 73–75.