page_title: Historic recurrence
section_title: Lessons
hierarchical_section_title: Historic recurrence / Lessons
caption_attribution_description: English: Statue of Ibn Khaldun in front of the Cathedral of St. Vincent de Paul, Avenue Habib Bourguiba, Tunis.
context_page_description: Historic recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history. The concept of historic recurrence has variously been applied to the overall history of the world, to repetitive patterns in the history of a given polity, and to any two specific events which bear a striking similarity.
  Hypothetically, in the extreme, the concept of historic recurrence assumes the form of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, which has been written about in various forms since antiquity and was described in the 19th century by Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Nietzsche.
  While it is often remarked that "history repeats itself", in cycles of less than cosmological duration this cannot be strictly true. In this interpretation of recurrence, as opposed perhaps to the Nietzschean interpretation, there is no metaphysics. Recurrences take place due to ascertainable circumstances and chains of causality. An example is the ubiquitous phenomenon of multiple independent discovery in science and technology, described by Robert K. Merton and Harriet Zuckerman.
context_section_description: G.W. Trompf notes that most western concepts of historic recurrence imply that "the past teaches lessons for... future action"—that "the same... sorts of events which have happened before... will recur..."  One such recurring theme was early offered by Poseidonius (a Greek polymath, native to Apamea, Syria; ca 135–51 BCE), who argued that dissipation of the old Roman virtues had followed the removal of the Carthaginian challenge to Rome's supremacy in the Mediterranean world. The theme that civilizations flourish or fail according to their responses to the human and environmental challenges that they face, would be picked up two thousand years later by Toynbee.  Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BCE – after 7 BCE), while praising Rome at the expense of her predecessors—Assyria, Media, Persia, and Macedonia—anticipated Rome's eventual decay.  He thus implied the idea of recurring decay in the history of world empires—an idea that was to be developed by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (1st century BCE) and by Pompeius Trogus, a 1st-century BCE Roman historian from a Celtic tribe in Gallia Narbonensis.
  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 Greece and Macedonia.  In the case of each empire, growth had resulted from consolidation against an external enemy; Rome herself, in response to Hannibal's threat posed at Cannae, had risen to great-power status within a mere five decades.  With Rome's world dominion, however, aristocracy had been supplanted by a monarchy, which in turn tended to decay into tyranny; after Augustus Caesar, good rulers had alternated with tyrannical ones.  The Roman Empire, in its western and eastern sectors, had become a contending ground between contestants for power, while outside powers acquired an advantage.  In Rome's decay, Zosimus saw history repeating itself in its general movements.
  The ancients developed an enduring metaphor for a polity's evolution:  they drew 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 – ca 130 CE), and Ammianus Marcellinus (between 325 and 330 CE – after 391 CE).  This social-organism metaphor, which has been traced back to the Greek philosopher and polymath  Aristotle (384–322 BCE), 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, about to analyze the vicissitudes of Florentine and Italian politics between 1434 and 1494, described recurrent oscillations between "order" and "disorder" within states:
  when states have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline.  In the same manner, having been reduced by disorder and sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend, and thus from good they gradually decline to evil and from evil mount up to good.
  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 Greek historian Thucydides, saw human nature as remarkably stable—steady enough for the formulation of rules of political behavior.  Machiavelli wrote in his Discorsi:
  Whoever considers the past and the present will readily observe that all cities and all peoples... ever have been animated by the same desires and the same passions; so that it is easy, by diligent study of the past, to foresee what is likely to happen in the future in any republi
caption: Statue of Ibn Khaldun in Tunis, Tunisia
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