Philippe Fabry's 2,000 Year-Long Civilizational Cycles
Description
Synthesis from Claude, prompted by Michel Bauwens. Inspired by this video presentation.
Claude:
Based on the "historionomie" theory developed by Philippe Fabry, a French historian of law and political ideas. Here's the gist of what he argues:
* The core idea
Fabry claims to have identified a recurring historical pattern lasting nearly two millennia and comprising more than forty stages, distributed across four cycles he labels A, B, C, and D. The ~2,150-year figure you heard is his estimate for the full length of one such cycle.
* The four parallel cycles
He pairs up civilizations that he says follow the same script at a roughly 2,000-year remove:
- Cycle A: ancient Greece and Western Europe
- Cycle B: ancient Roman power and the United States
- Cycle C: ancient Jewish civilization and Arab-Muslim civilization
- Cycle D: the ancient Assyrian and Persian civilizations and the Turkish empires from the Seljuks to the Ottomans
He builds these parallels the same way earlier historians did piecemeal — for instance comparing Greece's "dark ages" to the European Middle Ages, likening the suicidal conflict of WWI to the Peloponnesian War (a comparison Albert Thibaudet and Arnold Toynbee both made), Jules Isaac comparing Vichy France to Athens's Thirty Tyrants, and Oswald Spengler treating ancient Greece and medieval/modern Europe as one civilization repeating the path of the other — but Fabry tries to systematize all of this into one repeating template rather than isolated analogies.
He also speculates about an earlier occurrence of the same cycle in the Bronze Age, tentatively mapping Minoan Crete onto cycle A, Mycenaean civilization onto cycle B, and Mesopotamian empires onto cycle D.
* Where he places us now, and what comes next
Fabry situates the contemporary West at a late stage of its cycle, heading toward a period of imperial/institutional breakdown. He predicts that after this comes a temporary "technological Middle Ages" caused by a degradation of information storage and transmission, before civilization finds its footing again. He also argues China is set to inherit Western values much as Rome inherited Greece's — and, self-aware about how this sounds, he nods to Isaac Asimov's fictional "psychohistory" from the Foundation series as a sci-fi cousin of his project.
* Background
Fabry calls his method "historionomie" — the attempt to theorize history the way one theorizes astronomy or economics, tracing it back to the tradition of Fernand Braudel's longue durée, and describes it as an empirical, cumulative approach following the standard scientific method of observation, hypothesis, testing, and revision. He laid the groundwork in his 2014 book Rome, du libéralisme au socialisme and developed the cycle theory fully in Histoire du siècle à venir (2015).
Excerpts
Philippe Fabry with comments from Pierre-Louis Gourdoux:
(translated from the French by Claude)
"In Rome, the massive influx of slaves in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC upended the economic structures, ruining citizens and depriving them of work. Slaves could do everything, from manual to intellectual trades. The replacement of free men by slaves was therefore massive, rapid, and systematic. The shock was too abrupt, and Roman society could not absorb it politically. Economically, robotics will play a role comparable to the explosion of slavery in Rome: in developed countries, half of the human workforce is expected to be replaced by robots within twenty or thirty years. That is the same proportion as in the Industrial Revolution, but six to seven times faster. Throughout the West, and specifically in the United States, this will give considerably greater political weight to demands for redistribution, enough to translate into political and institutional changes. In time, America will become a system as blocked and sterile as the USSR. Unlike the USSR, however, it holds a position of global dominance and will not collapse before having extended its system to its entire empire, as Rome did."
This collapse should be followed by "a new technological Middle Ages," owing to the temporary degradation of the means of storing and transmitting information, before civilization finds its way again and re-emerges. According to P. Fabry, China will be the "heir to Western values, as Rome was to Greece."
As a small nod to science fiction fans, the author mentions psychohistory, the fictional discipline invented by Isaac Asimov for his Foundation series. This allows one last parallel: in that story, the galactic empire is about to collapse and enter a barbarian interlude of nearly 1,000 years. Any resemblance to future events is purely coincidental..."
(https://contrepoints-archives.org/histoire-du-siecle-a-venir-de-philippe-fabry/)
On cycles
(translated by Claude)
Philippe Fabry:
""First, we need to know what is meant by 'cycles.' What I call a 'cycle' is not a repetition of the same by the same. It is a repetition (itself relative, since there is a linear 'foundation,' notably artistic and scientific) of the same by another. And this is fundamental, because the other who begins again does so without experience. It is a blank slate. The European nations that reproduced the Greek pattern had, so to speak, no past: the great destructions at the end of the Roman Empire, combined with the ethnic mixing of the Great Migrations, resulting in five centuries of political decomposition into feudalism, made medieval man start over from practically zero at the level of civilization, that is, of ethnogenesis and of the political construction of the City. The reflexive effect only truly works from the same on the same."
(https://contrepoints-archives.org/histoire-du-siecle-a-venir-de-philippe-fabry/)
More information
- Book: Histoire du siècle à venir, de Philippe Fabry
- Negative review by Xavier Denecker in Transhumance, https://xavierdenecker.fr/histoire-du-siecle-a-venir/