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Historical recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history. The concept of historical recurrence has variously been applied to overall human history ( e.g., to the rises and falls of ), to repetitive patterns in the history of a given polity, and to any two specific events which bear a striking similarity.G.W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, from Antiquity to the Reformation, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979, .
In his book The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, G. W. Trompf traces historically recurring patterns of political thought and behavior in the West since antiquity.
An eastern concept that bears a kinship to western concepts of historical recurrence is the China concept of the Mandate of Heaven, by which an unjust ruler will lose the support of Heaven and be overthrown.Elizabeth Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China, Sharpe, 2002, , passim. Confucius (ca. 551 – ca. 479 BCE) urged: "Study the past if you would define the future."Sherif Khalifa, Geography and the Wealth of Nations, Lexington Books, 2022, , p. 201.
In the Islamic world, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) wrote that asabiyyah (social cohesion or group unity) plays an important role in a kingdom's or dynasty's cycle of rise and fall.Ibn Khaldun. The Muqaddimah. Translated by Franz Rosenthal. .
G. W. Trompf describes various historical of historical recurrence, including paradigms that view types of large-scale historical phenomena variously as "cyclical"; "fluctuant"; "reciprocal"; "re-enacted"; or "revived".G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 2–3 and passim. He also notes "the view proceeding from a belief in the uniformity of human nature Trompf's. It holds that because human nature does not change, the same sort of events can recur at any time."G.W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, p. 3 and passim. "Other minor cases of recurrence thinking", he writes, "include the isolation of any two specific events which bear a very striking similarity, and the preoccupation with parallelism, that is, with resemblances, both general and precise, between separate sets of historical phenomena" (emphasis in original).
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BCEafter 7 BCE), after praising Rome, anticipated its eventual decay, suggesting the idea of recurring decay in the history of world empires—an idea developed by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (1st century BCE) and by Pompeius Trogus, a 1st-century BCE Ancient Rome historian from a tribe in Gallia Narbonensis.G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 186–87.
By the late 5th century, Zosimus (also called "Zosimus the Historian"; fl. 490s–510s: a Byzantine historian who lived in Constantinople) could see the writing on the Roman wall, and asserted that empires fell due to internal disunity. He gave examples from the histories of ancient Greece and Macedonia. In Rome's decay, Zosimus saw history repeating itself in its general movements, which he related to the Fates and "astral orbits".G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 187–88.
The ancients developed an enduring metaphor for a polity's evolution, drawing an analogy between an individual human's life cycle and developments undergone by a body politic: this metaphor was offered, in varying iterations, by Cicero (106–43 BCE), Seneca (c. 1 BCE – 65 CE), Florus (c. 74 CE – c. 130 CE), and Ammianus Marcellinus (between 325 and 330 CE – after 391 CE).G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, pp. 188–192. This social organism metaphor, which has been traced back to the Greek philosopher and polymath Aristotle (384–322 BCE),George R. MacLay, The Social Organism: A Short History of the Idea that a Human Society May Be Regarded as a Gigantic Living Creature, North River Press, 1990, , passim. would recur centuries later in the works of the French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the English philosopher and polymath Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).
Niccolò Machiavelli, analyzing the state of Florence and Italy politics between 1434 and 1494, described recurrent oscillations between "order" and "disorder" within states:G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, p. 256.
Machiavelli accounts for this oscillation by arguing that virtù (valor and political effectiveness) produces peace, peace brings idleness (ozio), idleness disorder, and disorder rovina (ruin). In turn, from rovina springs order, from order virtù, and from this, glory and good fortune. Machiavelli, as had the ancient Greece historian Thucydides, saw human nature as remarkably stable—steady enough for the formulation of rules of political behavior. Machiavelli wrote in his Discorsi:
In 1377, the Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, in his Muqaddima (or Prolegomena), wrote that when tribes become united by asabiyya—Arabic language for "group feeling", "social solidarity", or "clannism"—their superior social cohesion and military prowess puts urban dwellers at their mercy. Inspired often by religion, they conquer the towns and create new . But within a few generations, writes Ibn Khaldun, the victorious tribesmen lose their asabiyya and become corrupted by luxury, extravagance, and leisure. The ruler, who can no longer rely on fierce warriors for his defense, will have to raise extortionate taxes to pay for other sorts of soldiers, and this in turn may lead to further problems that result in the eventual downfall of his dynasty or state.Malise Ruthven, "The Otherworldliness of Ibn Khaldun" (review of Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography, Princeton University Press, 2018, , 243 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 2 (February 7, 2019), p. 23.
Joshua S. Goldstein suggests that empires, analogously to an individual's midlife crisis, experience a political midlife crisis: after a period of expansion in which all earlier goals are realized, overconfidence sets in, and governments are then likely to attack or threaten their strongest rival. Goldstein cites four examples: the British Empire and the Crimean War; the German Empire and the First World War; the Soviet Union and the Cuban Missile Crisis; the United States and the Vietnam War.Joshua S. Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age, 1988, passim.
In The Trouble with History, Adam Michnik writes: "The world is full of and , liars and those lied to, and the terrorized. There is still someone dying at Thermopylae, someone drinking a glass of hemlock, someone crossing the Rubicon, someone drawing up a proscription list."Paul Wilson, "Adam Michnik: A Hero of Our Time", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 6 (April 2, 2015), p. 74.
The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana observed: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."George Santayana, The Life of Reason, vol. 1: Reason in Common Sense, 1905. Plutarch's Parallel Lives traces the similarities between pairs of historical figures, one Greek and one Roman.James Romm, ed., Plutarch: Lives that Made Greek History, Hackett, 2012, p. vi.
In 1812, French Emperor a Corsican outsiderwas unprepared for an extended winter campaign yet invaded the Russian Empire, precipitating the fall of the French Empire; and in 1941, German Führer an Austrian outsiderwas unprepared for an extended winter campaign yet invaded the Russian Empire's Soviet successor state, which was ruled by Joseph Stalin, born a Georgian outsider, thus 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. worked to liberate his compatriots by peaceful means and was shot dead.
Over history, confrontations between peoples – typically, geographical neighbors – help consolidate the peoples into , at times into frank ; until at last, exhausted by conflicts and drained of resources, the once militant polities settle into a relatively peaceful habitus.Paul Kennedy, , New York, Random House, 1987, , passim. Martin Indyk observes: "Wars often don't end until both sides have exhausted themselves and become convinced that they are better off coexisting with their enemies than pursuing a futile effort to destroy them."Martin Indyk, "The Strange Resurrection of the Two-State Solution: How an Unimaginable War Could Bring About the Only Imaginable Peace", Foreign Affairs, vol. 103, no. 2 (March/April 2024), pp. 8–12, 14–22. (p. 22.)
Since before recorded history, adverse environmental changes have affected the prosperity and the very survival of human societies. Christopher de Bellaigue writes:
Polities, at their peril, now effectively ignore ', ', atmospheric scientists', ', and ' warnings of tipping points in the climate system that are on course to destroy all of mankind. Joshua Busby, writing in Foreign Affairs, argues that "climate change matters more than anything else."Joshua Busby, "Warming World: Why Climate Change Matters More Than Anything Else", Foreign Affairs, vol. 97, no. 4 (July / August 2018), p. 54. Humans, -minded, tend to doubt what has not been presented by their own senses or by unquestioned authorities, and inertly to not act unless compelled by forces of circumstances. John Vaillant, author of the book Fire Weather, writes – in reference to the global warming crisis – of "the self-protective tendency to favor the status quo over a potentially disruptive scenario one has not witnessed personally."John Washington, "Burning Up" (review of John Vaillant, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, Knopf, 2023, 414 pp.; and Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, Little, Brown, 2023, 385 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXI, no. 8 (9 May 2024), pp. 40–42. (p. 41.)
Fintan O'Toole writes about American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998):
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020), documents the "viral recurrence" around the world, over the past century, of despots and "with comparable strategies of control and mendacity".Ariel Dorfman, "A Taxonomy of Tyrants" (review of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Norton, 2020, 358 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVIII, no. 9 (27 May 2021), pp. 25–27. (p. 25.)
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