Philosophy of History - Cyclical and Linear History

Cyclical and Linear History

Given that human beings currently believe themselves to be the only Earthly creatures capable of abstract thought, a perception of time, and a manipulation of thought concerning the past, the future and the present, an inquiry into the nature of history is based in part on some working understanding of time in the human experience.

History (as contemporarily understood by Western thought), tends to follow an assumption of linear progression: "this happened, and then that happened; that happened because this happened first." This is in part a reflection of Western Thought's foundation of cause and effect.

Most ancient cultures held a mythical conception of history and time that was not linear. They believed that history was cyclical with alternating Dark and Golden Ages. Plato called this the Great Year, and other Greeks called it an aeon or eon. Examples are the ancient doctrine of eternal return, which existed in Ancient Egypt, the Indian religions, or the Greek Pythagoreans' and the Stoics' conceptions. In The Works and Days, Hesiod described five Ages of Man: the Gold Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age and the Iron Age, which began with the Dorian invasion. Other scholars suggest there were just four ages, corresponding to the four metals, and the Heroic age was a description of the Bronze Age. A four age count would be in line with the Vedic or Hindu ages known as the Kali, Dwapara, Treta and Satya yugas. The Greeks believed that just as mankind went through four stages of character during each rise and fall of history so did government. They considered democracy and monarchy as the healthy regimes of the higher ages; and oligarchy and tyranny as corrupted regimes common to the lower ages.

In the East cyclical theories of history were developed in China (as a theory of dynastic cycle) and in the Islamic world by Ibn Khaldun.

The story of the Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden in Judaism and Christianity can be seen in a similar light, which would give the basis for theodicies, which attempts to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with the existence of God creating a global explanation of history with the belief in a Messianic Age. Theodicies claimed that history had a progressive direction leading to an eschatological end, such as the Apocalypse, given by a superior power. Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas or Bossuet in his Discourse On Universal History (1679) formulated such theodicies, but Leibniz, who coined the term, was the most famous philosopher who created a theodicy. Leibniz based his explanation on the principle of sufficient reason, which states that anything that happens, does happen for a specific reason. Thus, what man saw as evil, such as wars, epidemia and natural disasters, was in fact only an effect of his perception; if one adopted God's view, this evil event in fact only took place in the larger divine plan. Hence, theodicies explained the necessity of evil as a relative element that forms part of a larger plan of history. Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason was not, however, a gesture of fatalism. Confronted with the antique problem of future contingents, Leibniz invented the theory of "compossible worlds", distinguishing two types of necessity, to cope with the problem of determinism.

During the Renaissance, cyclical conceptions of history would become common, illustrated by the decline of the Roman Empire. Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy (1513–1517) are an example. The notion of Empire contained in itself its ascendance and its decadence, as in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), which was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Cyclical conceptions were maintained in the 19th and 20th centuries by authors such as Oswald Spengler, Nikolay Danilevsky, and Paul Kennedy, who conceived the human past as a series of repetitive rises and falls. Spengler, like Butterfield was writing in reaction to the carnage of the first World War, believed that a civilization enters upon an era of Caesarism after its soul dies. He thought that the soul of the West was dead and Caesarism was about to begin.

The recent development of mathematical models of long-term secular sociodemographic cycles has revived interest in cyclical theories of history (see, for example, Historical Dynamics by Peter Turchin, or Introduction to Social Macrodynamics by Andrey Korotayev et al.).