The Movements of History
Does history move in repeating cycles? Or in a linear unfolding of progress? Or is history just flotsam and jetsam circulating at random? I have thoughts.
As I explain below, I’m sick—too sick to record an audio version of this post. With any luck, I’ll be back to it for my first post of next week.
This is the last of the three weeks during which I’m writing just one post. The usual two-post-a-week pace will return next week, as I announced before Christmas. That’s still my ambition, but I’ve come down with Covid here in the middle of the week of January 6. I should be past the worst of it by next week, when I will also be working on putting my syllabi together for two classes I’m teaching at Penn this spring (starting a week from today). But whenever illness is involved, it’s important to acknowledge uncertainty—and fragility. And so I want to begin this post by admitting that it was written through the haze of a low-grade fever, a very stuffy nose, a persistent cough, and a mix of recently taken DayQuil and the residual hangover from last night’s NyQuil.
Will it be my best work? I doubt it! But it will be the best I’m capable of under the circumstances. For that reason, I’m publishing this post without a paywall.
The History of History
Much as I’m tempted to delve deeply into Trump’s bizarre press conference on Tuesday, I think I’ve already said everything I have to say on the subject of the incoming president’s talk of snatching Greenland from Denmark, absorbing Canada into the United States, and reasserting American control over the Panama Canal. That he’s now added the idea of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to reflect the American greatness he discerns when he glances in the mirror doesn’t change anything I said in last week’s post. If the verbal bluster of the transition period is matched with blustering deeds beginning on the afternoon of January 20, I will return to the subject and elaborate on it. Until then, I’ll let Trump’s remarks pass without further comment.
Instead of focusing on the news cycle during the opening days of 2025, I want to talk about … history. Not specific moments in or stories about our past, but history itself as a humanistic pursuit. The fancy term for this subject is historiography—the study and examination of changing and competing stories, down through the decades and centuries, about the past.
There are two broad reasons I’ve ended up interested in this topic at this moment. The first should be clear from a number of my recent posts. Attentive readers will note how many of them venture a narrative about our past and present—and how many of these narratives stand in tension with one another. It’s as if, especially since the presidential election on November 5, I’ve been brought back, over and over again, to square one. That’s kind of the theme of my post about the history of American conservatism, and also of the several posts in which I’ve tried to assimilate the 2024 election into a new story of the American present and past.
The ambition to do that—and the felt need to do it—follows from my surprise at the scope of Trump’s win, but also from a conviction that the settled narrative presumed by both “resistance” liberals and the Never Trump faction of conservatives since 2015 is inadequate and needs to be abandoned, or at least significantly revised.
Alternative Stories About Ourselves
I was politically content during the 1990s. The apparent inevitabilities of the end of history, in which every country in the world was presumed to be oriented teleologically toward liberal democracy, with political competition within each country confined to within ten yards of the fifty-yard line, felt very right. From that standpoint, the rise of right-populism with Brexit, Trump, and the other developments of the past decade felt like a form of atavism, the resurrection and resurgence of something presumed dead and buried—but something also bound, in the end, to fail, if only centrist liberals could muster the will to defeat it once again.
I believed that through much of the first Trump administration. It felt most right in the wake of Joe Biden’s win in 2020, and especially during the ominous but also pathetic temper tantrum Trump threw during his final months in office. But my confidence was haunted by doubts throughout the Biden administration, as Trump stuck around and maintained the support of his party while the “the system” went after him from a million directions. By the time of Trump’s robust victory last November, my confidence had been shattered. There was nothing inevitable about a liberal triumph and a defeat for the forces of right-populism. My efforts over the past two months to go back again and again to the drawing board to construct a new narrative to make sense of the world is an expression of the need for reorientation.
At the same time, one of my most loyal right-leaning readers has repeatedly left comments on my posts asking me to take a “deep dive” into the theories of historical cycles that have gained a surprising number of adherents in recent years. One example is Peter Turchin’s End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, which suggests that the political destabilization of the past decade has been caused by “the overproduction of elites” (journalists, professors, intellectuals, and other “knowledge workers” or “symbolic analysts”), who, with declining prospects for remunerative careers, have turned on the system itself, leading to political instability. I’m not going to delve into Turchin’s work here, beyond saying that I’m unpersuaded by it, and for reasons very similar to those adduced by Yascha Mounk in his excellent critical appraisal from a month ago. I recommend it highly.
Turchin’s book came out in 2023. But there is also an older version of this kind of argument that’s been in circulation for much longer. First suggested in the writings of William Strauss and Neil Howe during the 1990s and continually updated by the latter in the years since Strauss’ death in 2007, this is the theory that history moves in four generational (20-25-year) cycles of decline that reset and repeat roughly every 80 to 100 years. To reduce the theory to a slogan or meme, it posits that “Hard times make hard men, hard men make good times, good times make soft men, and soft men make hard times.” Howe describes this last step in the cycle as the “fourth turning,” which brings society back to the start, with the “hard men” created by hard times building new good times, which begins the cycle of decline once more.
My reader wants to know what I think of these theories and those like them, which help him to make sense of the confusing times in which we live.
My answer is: I don’t take them very seriously.
And I think it’s worth explaining why.
Progress and Return
I don’t mean to suggest there’s nothing of value in such cyclical theories of history. If the choice is between affirming the truth of a theory of cyclical or linear/dialectical progress, I find myself more inclined toward cyclical theories. There have been many variations of them, including different versions in Plato, Polybius, GB Vico, and Martin Heidegger. (Heidegger’s variation can look like a theory of linear decline, but he famously expresses hope for “another beginning” that would return us to something roughly analogous to the situation of the pre-Socratic Greeks. That points toward the workings of a deeper, long-term cyclical pattern underneath the apparent unilinear decline unfolding in the “wasteland” of modernity.)
The thing I appreciate in these cyclical accounts of history is the insistence that human nature remains what it is, leading to repetition of patterns down through the ages. That strikes me as more defensible than progressive notions of history that suggest a development of humanity beyond earlier patterns of behavior toward new ones grounded in our improved condition, whether that improvement unfolds developmentally over long periods of time or instantaneously at moments of historical crisis or rupture. (Both Christianity and Marxism posit something like the latter.)
I don’t think human history validates these progressive expectations. Yet I’ve also had nice things to say about Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis above and in prior posts. How can that be reconciled with my skepticism about progress? By emphasizing that what I appreciate about Fukuyama’s thesis is its Platonic psychology, and in particular its suggestion (via Alexandre Kojève’s radical reading of G.W.F. Hegel) that “thumos” (or the desire for recognition) is the motor behind political and human history.
I’m not sure that’s correct, but I consider it a reasonable hypothesis that does not require affirming the position that liberal democracy has managed to satisfy this desire so fully and enduringly that history has reached its terminus. I’ve always been much less convinced by that part of the theory than the psychological aspect—while also conceding that the full, much more ambitious form of it is quite fruitfully provocative and worth wrestling with.
To Construct a Usable Past
But what about the kinds of cyclical theories my subscriber finds so compelling? I consider them interesting and worth pondering while also refusing to take them too seriously. Or rather, I think that we should take them with numerous grains of salt.
Why? Because a theory or philosophy of history has so much material to draw on—basically, everything that’s ever happened—that it ends up being unfalsifiable. There are always innumerable narratives to be constructed from that over-abundance of evidence. Some of those narratives might have value by clarifying certain things about the past and present. But are any of them the story? I tend to doubt it.
One of the best skeptical takedowns of such historical narratives I’ve ever read was published in The New Republic in 2012 by my friend and teacher Mark Lilla. His essay is powerfully effective not because he thoroughly and convincingly refutes the claims of a specific historical narrative, but because in the course of the essay he offers several alternative (and sometimes diametrically contradictory) readings of the same historical episodes. All of them are compelling, highlighting aspects of the past and present, but none of them are exhaustive.
When such speculations are proposed with a requisite dose of humility—as one of many possible stories the human mind can impose on the otherwise shapeless stream of facts and events—they have real value. Hence my efforts over the past few months to propose multiple stories to make better sense of where we’ve ended up politically in the early days of 2025 than we’ve been able to achieve over the past nine years or so. Which of those stories will stick in my mind, helping me to orient myself on a deep level over the coming months and years? And which will fall by the wayside, disregarded for failing to make adequate sense of what’s going on around us?
I know of no way to answer that question beyond telling you to stop back here six month or a year or four years or ten years from now, to have a look around and see which stories I’m using to orient myself in the world. Maybe that’s just a way of saying I’m hard at work attempting to construct a usable past.
On some days, I wonder if there’s anything of greater value for an intellectual to do with his life and his mind.
Enjoyed these reflections and those of commentators. To me the cyclical theories I've read, and most progressives ones as well, aren't very coherent because they usually leave out the singular changes to the planet.
How can history really recur when the physical means of sustaining human life will be (has already been) so drastically altered? Even if we posited a consensus view (in the West) about human goods and harms, how could those goods/harms as measured in the 17th or 19th century ever come back around to something comparable in the 21st or 22nd century? All the good things––productivity of wealth, medical advances, utility from technology, denaturalizing of various kinds of domination––aren't comparably "good" across time if what is deemed good turns out to be neither progressive nor regressive but kind of non-measurable, given the huge uncertainties about what they mean vis a vis the necessary foundation for human life.
Then there is the fact that neither cyclical nor progressive models of history would make much sense to peoples who were killed at a big enough mass scale that they had no real descendants, and the end of history has already come. (The singular "we" of the species might be a dubious construct to think with.)
If that framework does invalidate those models of history, it doesn't make history shapeless or without rhyme or reason; one-directional historical change certainly happens and may very well make all the difference. But it's a lot hard to name that shape. It does suggest to me, though, that "progress" as a Western post 1492 concept might turn out to be the biggest misnomer in human history. Or it might not, which means that core concept is a bad guide for thinking with.
My perspective in discussions like this is always significantly colored by my collegiate training and continuing interest in our biological origins and evolution. It is always useful to remember that the distance between the time we became human (and of course debate about that is hardly completed) and the time the Agricultural Revolution gave us the potential to create what we call ‘civilization' (a term itself fraught with contradictions) is at least a million if not closer to two million. The period of our history then (as compared to our pre-history - that period before the invention of writing - is miniscule. So the hunter/gatherer that emerged from the Paleolithic/Mesolithic had an immense time in which to cement our genetic heritage into place.
We are a complex creature in terms of innate behavior versus learned behavior - our long running Nature versus Nuture controversy. The human brain, that most fascinating creation, has given us the ability to stare at ourselves in a way unknown to any other of our fellow creatures. We have taken that ability and made a vast array of propositions about ourselves - some reasonable, some fantastic, some lunatic. But some traits stand out, and they are reflected in those tendencies which have shown themselves consistently through our individual and collective actions through our history.
What are our longest standing traits? One of them, as I’ve often postulated in posts across the spectrum is our continuing and insatiable determination to separate ourselves into groups of all kinds based on a variety of physical, religious, sexual, political, financial, social, and racial characteristics. Indeed there is almost no difference, real or imagined, however minuscule that has not incited some group or another to separate themselves from some other group or all other groups. The most interesting part of this tendency is that there is really only one difference that has any basis at all in actual biological reality - that we are divided into at least two sexes. And even there the differences are somewhat fluid and in all but one way (the process of procreation) differ only by degree.
Yet over time, we have consistently taken all the other differences, which at most should be subjects of little more than spirited debate to all sorts of lunatic lengths, including the kind of mass violence we call war and the ongoing and increasingly vast expenditures necessary to preparing for the that prospect. Indeed, at the moment a great number of us are actually talking about the unimaginable. large scale warfare between nuclear adversaries which could easily end us all.
So any debate about how the fact that we may have advanced since the dawn of civilization breaks down.