Historical recurrence

Historical recurrence is the concept that, in the study of history, similar events are sometimes found to re-occur. The concept has been applied to various levels of human history, from the rise and fall of empires, to patterns in the history of a given polity, to any two specific events which bear a striking similarity.G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, from Antiquity to the Reformation, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979, .

In his 1979 book The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, G. W. Trompf traces historically recurring patterns of political thought and behavior in the West since antiquity.

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Ancient western thinkers who thought about recurrence were largely concerned with cosmological rather than historical recurrence.G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 6–15. Western philosophers and historians who have discussed various concepts of historical recurrence include the Greek Hellenistic historian Polybius (c. 200 – c. 118 BCE), the Greek historian and rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BCE – after 7 BCE), Luke the Evangelist, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Correa Moylan Walsh (1862–1936), and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975).G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, passim.

G. W. Trompf describes various historical paradigms of historical recurrence, including paradigms that view types of large-scale historical phenomena variously as "cyclical"; "fluctuant"; "reciprocal"; "re-enacted"; or "revived".G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 2–3 and passim. 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."G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, p. 3 and passim. "Other minor cases of recurrence thinking", he writes, "include the isolation of any two specific events which bear a very striking similarity, and the preoccupation with parallelism, that is, with resemblances, both general and precise, between separate sets of historical phenomena".

In ancient Eastern thought, Confucius (ca. 551 – ca. 479 BCE) urged: "Study the past if you would define the future."Sherif Khalifa, Geography and the Wealth of Nations, Lexington Books, 2022, , p. 201.

In the Islamic world, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) remarked, in his Muqaddimah, that "The past resembles the future more than one [drop of] water another."Ibn Khaldun. The Muqaddimah. Translated by Franz Rosenthal. . He wrote that asabiyyah (social cohesion or group unity) plays an important role in a kingdom's or dynasty's cycle of rise and fall.Malise Ruthven, "The Otherworldliness of Ibn Khaldun" (review of Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography, Princeton University Press, 2018, 243 pp.,), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 2 (February 7, 2019), pp. 23–24, 26.

Lessons from history Trompf notes that most western concepts of historical recurrence imply that "the past teaches lessons for ... future action"—that "the same ... sorts of events which have happened before ... will recur".G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, p. 3. One proponent of the idea of cosmic cycles was Poseidonius (c. 135 – c. 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.G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, p. 185.

The theme that civilizations flourish or fail according to their responses to the human and environmental challenges that they face, was picked up two thousand years later by Arnold J. Toynbee.Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 volumes, Oxford University Press, 1934–1961, passim.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BCEafter 7 BCE), after praising Rome, anticipated its eventual decay, suggesting the idea of recurring decay in the history of world empires—an idea 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.G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 186–87.

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 Rome's decay, Zosimus saw history repeating itself in its general movements, which he related to the Fates and "astral orbits".G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 187–88.

The ancients developed an enduring metaphor for a polity's evolution, drawing 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 (c. 1 BCE – 65 CE), Florus (c. 74 CE – c. 130 CE), and Ammianus Marcellinus (between 325 and 330 CE – after 391 CE).G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 188–192. This social-organism metaphor, which has been traced back to the Greek philosopher and polymath Aristotle (384–322 BCE),George R. MacLay, The Social Organism: A Short History of the Idea that a Human Society May Be Regarded as a Gigantic Living Creature, North River Press, 1990, , passim. would recur centuries later in the works of the French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the English philosopher and polymath Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).

Niccolò Machiavelli, analyzing the state of Florentine and Italian politics between 1434 and 1494, described recurrent oscillations between "order" and "disorder" within states:G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, p. 256.

Machiavelli accounts for this oscillation by arguing that (valor and political effectiveness) produces peace, peace brings idleness (), idleness disorder, and disorder (ruin). In turn, from springs order, from order , and from this, glory and good fortune. 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 :

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 realized, overconfidence sets in, and governments are then likely to attack or threaten their strongest rival. Goldstein cites four examples: the British Empire and the Crimean War; the German Empire and the First World War; the Soviet Union and the Cuban Missile Crisis; the United States and the Vietnam War.Joshua S. Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age, 1988, passim.

Historical similarities One "minor case of recurrence thinking" identified by G. W. Trompf involves "the isolation of any two specific events which bear a very striking similarity" and a "preoccupation with parallelism, that is with resemblances, both general and precise, between separate sets of historical phenomena".G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, p. 3.

In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson wrote that people are "all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure".Freya Johnston, "'I'm coming, my Tetsie!'" (review of Samuel Johnson, edited by David Womersley, Oxford, May 2018, ; 1,344 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 41, no. 9 (9 May 2019), pp. 17-19. (p. 19.)

In The Trouble with History, Adam Michnik writes: "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."Paul Wilson, "Adam Michnik: A Hero of Our Time", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 6 (April 2, 2015), p. 74.

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana observed: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."George Santayana, The Life of Reason, vol. 1: Reason in Common Sense, 1905.

Plutarch's Parallel Lives traces the similarities between pairs of historical figures, one Greek and one Roman.James Romm, ed., Plutarch: Lives that Made Greek History, Hackett, 2012, p. vi.

In 1812, French Emperor Napoleonborn a Corsican outsiderwas unprepared for an extended winter campaign yet invaded the Russian Empire, precipitating the fall of the French Empire; and in 1941, German Führer Adolf Hitlerborn an Austrian outsiderwas unprepared for an extended winter campaign yet invaded the Russian Empire's Soviet successor state, which was ruled by Joseph Stalin, born a Georgian outsider, thus precipitating the fall of the Third Reich.

Mahatma Gandhi worked to liberate his compatriots by peaceful means and was shot dead; Martin Luther King Jr. worked to liberate his compatriots by peaceful means and was shot dead.

Over history, confrontations between peoples – typically, geographical neighbors – help consolidate the peoples into nations, at times into frank empires; until at last, exhausted by conflicts and drained of resources, the once militant polities settle into a relatively peaceful habitus.Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, New York, Random House, 1987, , passim. Martin Indyk observes: "Wars often don't end until both sides have exhausted themselves and become convinced that they are better off coexisting with their enemies than pursuing a futile effort to destroy them."Martin Indyk, "The Strange Resurrection of the Two-State Solution: How an Unimaginable War Could Bring About the Only Imaginable Peace", Foreign Affairs, vol. 103, no. 2 (March/April 2024), pp. 8–12, 14–22. (p. 22.)

Since before recorded history, adverse environmental changes have affected the prosperity and the very survival of human societies. Christopher de Bellaigue writes:

John Vaillant, in reference to the global-warming crisis, writes of "the self-protective tendency to favor the status quo over a potentially disruptive scenario one has not witnessed personally."John Washington, "Burning Up" (review of John Vaillant, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, Knopf, 2023, 414 pp.; and Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, Little, Brown, 2023, 385 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXI, no. 8 (9 May 2024), pp. 40–42. (p. 41.)

Fintan O'Toole writes about American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998):

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020), documents the "viral recurrence" around the world, over the past century, of despots and authoritarians "with comparable strategies of control and mendacity".Ariel Dorfman, "A Taxonomy of Tyrants" (review of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Norton, 2020, 358 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVIII, no. 9 (27 May 2021), pp. 25–27. (p. 25.)

Historical recurrence

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