Peter Turchin: A mathematician says history needs to be made more scientific
[Peter Turchin is professor of ecology and mathematics at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut 06269, USA. He is the author of War and Peace and War: The Life-Cycles of Imperial Nations (Pi Press, 2006).]
If we are to learn how to develop a healthy society, we must transform history into an analytical, predictive science, argues Peter Turchin. He has identified intriguing patterns across vastly different times and places.
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What caused the collapse of the Roman Empire? More than 200 explanations have been proposed1, but there is no consensus about which explanations are plausible and which should be rejected. This situation is as risible as if, in physics, phlogiston theory and thermodynamics coexisted on equal terms.
This state of affairs is holding us back. We invest in medical science to preserve the health of our bodies, and in environmental science to maintain the health of ecosystems. Yet our understanding of what makes societies healthy is in the pre-scientific stage.
Sociology that focuses on the past few years or decades is important. In addition, we need a historical social science, because processes that operate over long timescales can affect the health of societies. It is time for history to become an analytical, and even a predictive, science.
Splitters and lumpers
Every scientific discipline has its share of splitters, who emphasize the differences between things, and lumpers, who stress similarities in search of organizing principles. Lumpers dominate physics. In biology, splitters, who care most for the private life of warblers or the intricate details of a chosen signalling molecule, are roughly matched in numbers by lumpers, who try to find fundamental laws. Social sciences such as economics and sociology are rich in lumpers. Sadly, few are interested in applying analytical approaches to the past. History has an alarmingly small proportion of lumpers.
Rather than trying to reform the historical profession, perhaps we need an entirely new discipline: theoretical historical social science. We could call this 'cliodynamics', from Clio, the muse of history, and dynamics, the study of temporally varying processes and the search for causal mechanisms2, 3. Let history continue to focus on the particular. Cliodynamics, meanwhile, will develop unifying theories and test them with data generated by history, archaeology and specialized disciplines such as numismatics (the study of ancient coins).
Is this proposal feasible? The most compelling argument against the possibility of scientific history goes like this. Human societies are extremely complex. They consist of many different kinds of individuals and groups that interact in complex ways. People have free will and are therefore unpredictable. Moreover, the mechanisms that underlie social dynamics vary with historical period and geographical region. Medieval France clearly differed in significant ways from Roman Gaul, and both were very different to ancient China. It is all too messy, argue the naysayers, for there to be a unifying theory.
If this argument were correct, there would be no empirical regularities. Any relationships between important variables would be contingent on time, space and culture....
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If we are to learn how to develop a healthy society, we must transform history into an analytical, predictive science, argues Peter Turchin. He has identified intriguing patterns across vastly different times and places.
###
What caused the collapse of the Roman Empire? More than 200 explanations have been proposed1, but there is no consensus about which explanations are plausible and which should be rejected. This situation is as risible as if, in physics, phlogiston theory and thermodynamics coexisted on equal terms.
This state of affairs is holding us back. We invest in medical science to preserve the health of our bodies, and in environmental science to maintain the health of ecosystems. Yet our understanding of what makes societies healthy is in the pre-scientific stage.
Sociology that focuses on the past few years or decades is important. In addition, we need a historical social science, because processes that operate over long timescales can affect the health of societies. It is time for history to become an analytical, and even a predictive, science.
Splitters and lumpers
Every scientific discipline has its share of splitters, who emphasize the differences between things, and lumpers, who stress similarities in search of organizing principles. Lumpers dominate physics. In biology, splitters, who care most for the private life of warblers or the intricate details of a chosen signalling molecule, are roughly matched in numbers by lumpers, who try to find fundamental laws. Social sciences such as economics and sociology are rich in lumpers. Sadly, few are interested in applying analytical approaches to the past. History has an alarmingly small proportion of lumpers.
Rather than trying to reform the historical profession, perhaps we need an entirely new discipline: theoretical historical social science. We could call this 'cliodynamics', from Clio, the muse of history, and dynamics, the study of temporally varying processes and the search for causal mechanisms2, 3. Let history continue to focus on the particular. Cliodynamics, meanwhile, will develop unifying theories and test them with data generated by history, archaeology and specialized disciplines such as numismatics (the study of ancient coins).
Is this proposal feasible? The most compelling argument against the possibility of scientific history goes like this. Human societies are extremely complex. They consist of many different kinds of individuals and groups that interact in complex ways. People have free will and are therefore unpredictable. Moreover, the mechanisms that underlie social dynamics vary with historical period and geographical region. Medieval France clearly differed in significant ways from Roman Gaul, and both were very different to ancient China. It is all too messy, argue the naysayers, for there to be a unifying theory.
If this argument were correct, there would be no empirical regularities. Any relationships between important variables would be contingent on time, space and culture....