Historical recurrence

Authors

Ancient Western thinkers initially focused on cosmological rather than historical recurrence. Philosophers and historians who discussed historical recurrence include Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Luke the Evangelist, Niccolò Machiavelli, Giambattista Vico, Correa Moylan Walsh, and Arnold J. Toynbee. Trompf describes paradigms viewing large-scale historical phenomena as cyclical, fluctuant, reciprocal, re-enacted, or revived, and notes the view that because human nature does not change, the same sort of events can recur at any time. In ancient Eastern thought, Confucius urged studying the past to define the future. Ibn Khaldun remarked that the past resembles the future more than one drop of water another, and wrote that asabiyyah plays an important role in a kingdom's cycle of rise and fall.

Lessons from history

Most Western concepts of historical recurrence imply that the past teaches lessons for future action, as the same sorts of events will recur. Poseidonius argued that dissipation of old Roman virtues followed the removal of the Carthaginian challenge. Arnold J. Toynbee later picked up the theme that civilizations flourish or fail according to their responses to human and environmental challenges. Dionysius of Halicarnassus anticipated Rome's eventual decay, an idea developed by Diodorus Siculus and Pompeius Trogus.

Zosimus asserted that empires fell due to internal disunity, giving examples from Greece and Macedonia, and saw history repeating itself in general movements related to the Fates and astral orbits. Ancients developed a metaphor comparing a polity's evolution to an individual human life cycle, offered by Cicero, Seneca, Florus, and Ammianus Marcellinus, traced back to Aristotle, and recurring in works of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Émile Durkheim. Machiavelli described recurrent oscillations between order and disorder within states.

Historical similarities

Trompf identifies a minor case of recurrence thinking involving isolation of any two specific events bearing striking similarity and preoccupation with parallelism between separate sets of historical phenomena. Samuel Johnson wrote that people are all prompted by the same motives, deceived by the same fallacies, animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure. Adam Michnik writes that the world is full of inquisitors and heretics, liars and those lied to, terrorists and the terrorized, with someone still dying at Thermopylae, drinking hemlock, crossing the Rubicon, or drawing up a proscription list.

George Santayana observed that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Plutarch's Parallel Lives traces similarities between pairs of historical figures, one Greek and one Roman. In 1812, Napoleon, born a Corsican outsider, invaded the Russian Empire unprepared for an extended winter campaign, precipitating the fall of the French Empire; in 1941, Adolf Hitler, born an Austrian outsider, invaded the Soviet Union unprepared for an extended winter campaign, 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. did likewise and was shot dead. Confrontations between neighboring peoples help consolidate them into nations or empires until exhausted polities settle into a peaceful habitus. Martin Indyk observes that wars often do not end until both sides are convinced they are better off coexisting. Adverse environmental changes have affected human societies since before recorded history.

John Vaillant writes of the self-protective tendency to favor the status quo over a potentially disruptive scenario not witnessed personally.