Introduction

This brand new section started in March 2020 onwards will specialize in material showing evidence of historical cycles, and specifically, what I call 'The Pulsation of the Commons', which posits the ebb and flow of the commons as counter-cyclical to the ebb and flow of the extractive institutions such as markets and states.

Thus the question we attempt to answer in this section is: 'When Are We'. We start with the contention that we are going through a 'concatenation of cycles', i.e. different cycles of different duration which seem to be ending at the same time. This complicates the Planetary Phase Shift Framework, since each cycle has a 'different agenda', i.e. points to different problems that need to be solved, 'simultaneously'.

Thus we could summarize that we are

1) undergoing the end of Kondratieff Cycle, a 50-60 year cycle affecting the political economy ; 2) the 'Secular Cycle', as described in the Fourth Turning, which is a four-generation civic cycle, requiring a reform of civic institutions; this cycle is convergent with the War Cycles, which see a big hegemonic war every one hundred years or so (hence it is congruent with the 'Hegemonic Cycle'. 3) Civilizations itself are said to have a 1,000 year cycle (Spengler), which could be subdivided in two long periods of 500 years, respectively the decentralized culture cycle which establishes the civilization, and the 500 years of centralized empire; George Modelski has identified a 250 year 'learning cycle' which affects global institutions. But one could speculate, and this is our conviction, that it is the 5,000 year old civilizational cycle itself which is at state, which means an even deeper timeline.

1. The main 'personal' sources have been:

• The Pulsing Paradigm, from the school of Biophysical Economics (Howard T. Odum, etc ..)

• The work on Secular Cycles by the school of Cliodynamics by Peter Turchin et al.

• The work of Peter Pogany in Rethinking the World, i.e. the pendulum between stable systems and chaotic transitions

• The HANDY Model for Civilisational Collapse Scenarios, and the case studies provided by Mark Whitaker in: Political Origins of Environmental Degradation and the Environmental Origins of Axial Religions

• The Double Movement within capitalist society, i.e. the lib/lab pendulum identified by Karl Polanyi in the Great Transformation

However, human society is marked by 'cultural evolution' (Pogany) and like in the bio-physical world, there is an 'arrow of time', and in the case of human society, overall, an increase in social complexity and an accumulation of scientific and technical knowledge. This evolution of societal regimes involving greater and greater numbers of people, has to be coupled with the pulsation paradigm. This gives us an indication of an evolving spiral, in which thermodynamic cycles, socio-economic regimes, and human 'modes of apprehension (Gebser, Pogany), correlate to each other.

Please note:

• On the Pulsation of the Commons: Our own preliminary analysis of how the ebb and flow of the commons may fit in cycle-based theorizing: [1]

2. “Some of the best known theorists of the cycles of civilizations include the following:

• Spengler, in his book The Decline of the West (1918), argued that all cultures are subject to the same cycle of growth and decay.

• Toynbee in his Study of History (1934), described the existence of civilizations in a life cycle of four stages: genesis, growth, breakdown, and disintegration.

• Sorokin argued in Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937) that civilizations cycled through three cultural mentalities: ideational (spiritual needs), sensate (“wine, women, and song”), and idealistic (a balance of needs and ends).

• Quigley offered, in The Evolution of Civilizations (1961), seven stages of a civilization’s change: mixture, gestation, expansion, age of conflict, universal empire, decay, and invasion.

• Melko, in his book The Nature of Civilizations (1969), provides a model of a civilization cycle’s stages including crystallization, transition (T), complete disintegration (D), and ossification (freezing at a crystallized stage) (O)."

(https://alfinnextlevel.wordpress.com/2023/08/10/the-greatness-of-a-civilization-turns-against-it-and-brings-it-down/)

• For more: See our companion section dedicated to macrohistorians and overall civilizational analysis [2]

Timelines

Deepankar Basu:

"To identify the turning points of long waves before 1980, I draw on qualitative evidence from the historical literature summarized in Mandel (1978; 1995); for turning points after 1980, I draw on qualitative evidence presented in Kotz (2009). Together, this literature highlights the following 4 long waves since the middle of the 19th century:

• Long Wave 1 (1848-1893): composed of the upswing during 1848-1873, and the downswing from 1874 to 1893;

• Long Wave 2 (1894-1948): composed of the upswing from 1894 to 1913, and the downswing from 1914 to 1948 (1940 in non-European countries);

• Long Wave 3 (1949[41]-1982: composed of the upswing from 1949(41) to 1967, and the downswing from 1968 to 1982;

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311924741_Long_Waves_of_Capitalist_Development_An_Empirical_Investigation)

Typology

"The development of world political economy may be seen as an intersection of processes operating on four time scales:

1. Very long-term evolution the development of the world system and its changing geographical size and composition.

2. Hegemony cycles the rise and fall of successive international orders. (cfr. Hegemonic Cycles)

3. Long waves in economics and war at the core of the world system. (cfr. Long Cycles)

4. Day-to-day and year-to-year change, including short cycles, events, and random or local influences."

- Joshua Goldstein [3]

Types of Temporal Societal and Civilizational Cycles

So far, I have been able to distinguish these types of cycles in the reviewed literature, from short to long:

• 50-60 years: The Kondratiev Cycles or 'waves', also called Long Cycles or Waves (see Long Cycle Theory), which take about 50-60 years and represent an ascending/descending cycle. Polanyi call it a lib/lab cycle: in the ascending part of the cycle, a new combination of technology, energy and managerial philosophy takes hold, which is initially good for labor and leads to welfare type reforms; its peak corresponds to a mid-life crisis, which is a supply and profit crisis for capital; this creates the conditions for a political counter-revolution, in which economic liberalism is strengthened (the lib phase), until market distortions, the 'demand crisis' in which every sector of society is indebted, leads to popular revolt and a new cycle.

• 100 years: The Hegemonic Cycle, 100 years or more, which defines an era dominated by a global hegemon, and its associated world 'order' (portugal-spain, Dutch, Britain I and II, US hegemony, possible followed by the hegemony of China or a multi-polar world order); it corresponds to the War Cycles, as each transition, declining and rising hegemons battle it out for supremacy.

• Spengler's 1,000-year civilizational cycle, can be divided into two periods of 500 years, representing the culture vs the civilizational phase; and which can be interpreted as a decentralization vs centralization cycle, the latter characterized by imperial structures. These 500 year changes can also be seen as profound changes in the value regimes of a society: f.e. 500 fall of Roman Empire, 1,000 'First European Revolution', 1500: Reformation, 2,000 = current crisis. Duration 450-500 years. This also seems to correspond to the 16-generation Learning Cycle of deeper civilizational model change, defined by George Modelski. See: Long-Term Trends in Politics

• Toynbee distinguishes between longer 'generations of civilization'

• Following Kojin Karatani, we can distinguish a shift, about 5,000 years ago, from tribal and kinship based modalities of gifting and commoning (mode A), to market and state-dominated civilizational models. It can be hypothesized that there is now a grand shift towards more complex mutual coordination capacities.

Key Quotes

“The most common pattern he presents is “an alternation of integrative and disintegrative phases lasting for roughly a century”. His predictions have a special urgency because western societies, and particularly America, are, he suggests, very near the end of that latter disintegrative phase, which makes the likelihood of civil war or potential systemic collapse far more likely. His model attempts to weight certain factors to predict this social meltdown. Key among them are rapidly growing inequality of wealth and wages, an overproduction of potential elites – children of wealthy dynasties, graduates with advanced degrees, frustrated social commentators – and an uncontrolled growth in public debt. In the US, he suggests – and by association the UK – these “factors started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s… The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability. And here we are.”

- Peter Turchin, paraphrased by Tim Adams [4]

"The basis for the reproduction of material life over world history has been the widescale utilization of the natural environment. The recurring outcome of this process seems to be ecological degradation. Nonetheless, world history also suggests periods of ecological recovery, and the penetration of new areas to sustain further world system evolution. Viewed in the long term, ecological degradation and recovery appear to recur in phases."

- Sing C. Chew [5]

Zak Stein on a Time between Worlds: From the Long 16th Cy to the Long 20th Century

"Metahistorians such as Turchin and Wallerstein have obtained results that display remarkably similar trends in the data, where there is a recurring cycle of demographic, economic, and political dynamics. For example, a period of relative stability in prices, labor practices, and inter-elite competition appears predictably to lead to eventual increasing economic inequality, price fluctuations (i.e., inflation), and increases in inter-elite competition (i.e., war). Once the competition ends there follows another stable period for some time, until the situation begins to unravel along the same lines as before, only this time with greater technological and geographical reach.

Working with these kinds of “macro-historical” trends allows for an approach to historical periodization. An important instance of this is seen in Braudel’s “secular cycles,” which represent long-term trends in economic systems.[18] Important for our story here is Braudel’s famous notion of the “long sixteenth century” (approx. 1450-1640), which was picked up by Wallerstein and turned into a general theory of epochal transitions between world-system hegemons. Evidence is adding up that makes it possible to begin to “carve history at the joints” and see into its deeper structures and dynamics: our world is waking up to its own metahistory.

One of the clearest distillations of this tradition can be found in Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century. As the title suggests, he applies the theory of secular cycles up to the present day and predicts the coming end of a major cycle. This entails the immanent birth of a new kind of global economic order."

- Zak Stein [6]

Proven Cyclicality in Agrarian Civilizations ?

"Recent comparative research shows that agrarian societies experience periods of instability about a century long every two or three centuries. These waves of instability follow periods of sustained population growth. For example, in Western Europe, rapid population growth during the thirteenth century was followed by the 'late-medieval crisis', comprising the Hundred Years War in France, the Hussite Wars in the German Empire, and the Wars of the Roses in England. Population increase in the sixteenth century was followed by the 'crisis of the seventeenth century' - the wars of religion and the Fronde in France, the Thirty Years War in Germany, and the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution. Similarly, population growth during the eighteenth century was followed by the 'age of revolutions', ranging from the French Revolution of 1789 to the pan-European revolutions of 1848.

Such oscillations between population growth and instability have been termed 'secular cycles'. Given the limitations of historical data, we need an appropriately coarse-grained method to determine the statistical significance, and the generality, of the pattern. The basic idea is to demarcate population growth and decline phases, and to count the instability incidents (such as peasant uprisings and civil wars) that occur during each phase.

With my colleagues Sergey Nefedov and Andrey Korotayev, I have collected quantitative data on demographic, social and political variables for several historical societies. Applying the above approach to eight secular cycles in medieval and early modern England, France, the Roman Empire and Russia, we find that the number of instability events per decade is always several times higher when the population was declining than when it was increasing. The probability of this happening by chance is vanishingly small. The same pattern holds for the eight dynasties that unified China, from the Western Han to the Qing, and for Egypt from the Hellenistic to the Ottoman periods."

- Peter Turchin [7]

Ibn Khaldun on the Asabiyyah Cycle

" ‘Group feeling and courage weaken. Members of the tribe revel in the wellbeing that God has given them... They have disdain also for all the other things that are necessary in connection with group feeling... Their group feeling and courage decrease in the next generations, eventually group feeling is altogether destroyed.’

So wrote the great philosopher Ibn Khaldun, born on this day in 1332 in Tunis, outlining a theory of history that has come to be called the Asabiyyah Cycle. Even if you may not have heard of Abu Zayd ‘Abdu r-Rahman bin Muhammad bin Khaldun Al-Hadrami al-Ishbili — to give him his full name — or read his great work The Muqaddimah, you may well recognise the meme that indirectly comes from his work, via a sci-fi author: ‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.’ Indeed the meme is well known enough that you’ve probably seen it used mostly with irony — but then irony is the great symptom of decadence, the final stage of the asabiyyah cycle."

- Ed West [8]

Jon Hollis on the Cycle of Bundling and Unbundling, Centralization vs Decentralization

= "cycles of decentralized cities and centralized states": Graphic (table) at [9]

"There’s only two ways to advance civilization: bundling and unbundling."

- Jim Barksdale [10]

"Once in a while, in the long arc of civilization, a new set of coordination technologies come along and change everything. By allowing small groups of humans to better cooperate in the collective management of resources, these technologies redefine power structures and lay the bedrock of a new civilizational era.

Humans are social creatures—we got to where we are by bootstrapping coordination tools into complex organizational structures. That bootstrapping process follows a repeating pattern of decentralization and centralization over the course of the rise and fall of civilizations:

• Technologies for coordination and communication rapidly bootstrap themselves into usefulness by civilization

• These new coordination technologies allow humans to form effective local, decentralized governance structures (eg cities)

• Ultimately, the federated network of decentralized governance is overpowered by a more efficient centralized structure of sovereignty

• The centralized sovereign structure eventually collapses under its own weight, restarting the cycle by creating a governance vacuum".

- Jon Hollis [11]

On Riding Cycles and the Distribution of Power

"Two American historians – George Modelski and William Thomp­son – explored the question of how the rise of great powers can be explained. They concluded that the most important prerequisite for the development of a great power is the leading mastery of a Kondratieff­ cycle. The reasons for this are easy to understand. Those who lead in comman­ding the basic innovation of a Kondratieff cycle, develop the most highly productive economy; those who have the most highly productive economy are able to finance the largest armies and fleets and the most modern weapons; those who own the most modern weapons and most powerful militaries can force their way on other countries and sooner or later become a political superpower."

- Leo and Simone Nefiodow [12]

Key Resources

Key Articles

• Lene Rachel Andersen on the Five Phases in the Evolution of Human Cultural Sensibilities. By Gregg Henriques.

• History of the Cycle-Based Interpretations of Human Evolution

• Mathematical Models to Calculate the Acceleration of Innovation Across Time

See also:

1. Gebser’s Five Structural Mutations of Consciousness and the Role of Dark Ages
2. Giambattista Vico's Stages in World History
3. Sri Aurobindo's Four Stage Cycle of Society
4. Viconian Civilizational Cycles
5. William Irwin Thompson on the Four Cultural Ecologies of the West
6. William Irwin Thompson’s Five Stages of Human Evolution

The Increasing Scale of Human Societies

• Theories of the Rise, Fall and Upward Sweeps of Urban Centers and Empires Throughout History
• Changes and Cycles in the Scale of Settlements and Polities Since the Bronze Age

Key Books

• The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. David Hackett Fischer. Oxford University Press, 1996.

Before Capitalism

• Secular Cycles. By Peter Turchin and Sergey A. Nefedov. Princeton University Press, 2009 [13]. Focuses on cycles with agriculture-centric societies up to industrialization.

• Anand Veeraraj. The Green History of Religion.

""Our findings showed that from about 12,000 BCE, the planet went through a warming trend causing extreme climate changes all across the globe. It disrupted primal societies and their ways of life and successively displaced ancient pastoral and agrarian communities. The warming trend intensified rapidly quickening the rise and fall of ancient civilizations at the core centers. The tumultuous social and ecological ethos of the pre-axial times became conducive for the formation of world-denying motifs that became the bedrock of all post-axial religions and philosophies. This, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Green History of Religion."

• Ecological Revolution: The Political Origins of Environmental Degradation and the Environmental Origins of Axial Religions; China, Japan, Europe. by Mark D. Whitaker: This book describes the ebb and flow of slow ecological degradation and the period uprisings of anti-systemic movements throughout human history, across continents.

• The Recurring Dark Ages: Ecological Stress, Climate Changes and System Transformation. By Sing C. Chew. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006 pdf. See: Recurring Dark Ages, Ecological Stress and System Transformation

After the Emergence of Capitalist Modernity

• Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages. Carlota Perez. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2002

[14]; for cycles within capitalism, see also Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation

• Long Waves of Capitalist Development. A Marxist Interpretation. by Ernest Mandel. Verso (Penguin/Random House), 1995 [15]

• The Great Transformation. Karl Polanyi: the lib-lab cycle within capitalism, associated to the Kondratieff waves, i.e.the periodic dis-embedding and re-embedding of markets in society.