Cliodynamics

Articles

• CRISES AVERTED. How A Few Past Societies Found Adaptive Reforms in the Face of Structural-Demographic Crises

  • Hoyer, Daniel;
  • Bennett, James S.;
  • Whitehouse, Harvey;
  • Francois, Pieter;
  • Reddish, Jenny;
  • Davis, Donagh;
  • Feeney, Kevin C;
  • Levine, Jill;
  • Holder, Samantha L;
  • Turchin, Peter

  Historians and social scientists have long been preoccupied with understanding and documenting periods of crisis. Such emphasis is only growing, and becoming more pressing, as the world continues to face a number of interrelated stressors in the form of irreversible climate change, major ecological shocks and disease outbreaks, eruptions of military violence, economic disruptions and deepening inequalities, political polarization and unrest, the rise of authoritarian and nationalist regimes. Crises in these domains are not new, but have been recurrent features of past societies. Although these periods have typically led to massive loss of life, the failure of critical institutions, and even complete societal collapse, there are instances in the historical record of societies managing to turn the tide of crisis even as violence and social turmoil grow. Here, we focus on four such cases of crises mitigated with structural reforms revealed from our previous historical analyses: early Republican Rome, mid-19th century England and Russia, USA during the the late 20th to early 21st centuries. Utilizing structural demographic theory as a lens to explore these cases, we seek to expose the pressures that built up leading to crisis and the early signs of violent confrontation revealed by these societies, as well as to examine the conditions and key decisions made in the midst of this unrest that allowed these societies to turn the tide and enact significant structural adaptations. Our findings have clear relevance to understanding and navigating similar crises in contemporary societies.

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• The State as a Socio-Evolutionary Response to the Challenges of the Scale of Control and the Continuity Gap

  • Rozov, Nikolai

  The article is an experience of theoretical reconstruction of the origin of the state as a natural phenomenon of evolution in general and social evolution in particular, under the formation of necessary and sufficient conditions. The analysis of R. Carneiro's criticism of M. Weber's classical definition, as well as the discussion of M. Berent's original concept of the non-state status of the ancient Greek polis, allow to formulate a new synthetic definition of the state. We add a new feature to the known characteristics: a formal structure of managerial positions reproduced across generations and independent of kinship relations. The conceptual scheme of the general evolutionary mechanism of the emergence of new structures combines classical ideas (from C. Darwin to A. Toynbee), as well as models of such anthropologists and sociologists (R. Carneiro, A. Stinchcombe, R. Collins, etc.). The scheme includes the following concepts: concerns, challenges-threats and challenges-opportunities, ingredients, response attempts, fixation mechanisms, providing structures, the most flexible and polyfunctional of which were called magic wands. The application of this construct to the theory of the origin of the state raises the question of the ingredients of the processes of formation of the first states. The ideas and results of the work of anthropologists and historical sociologists have made it possible to visualize the trends in the development of barbarian societies that led to the ingredients sought. Such reasoning not only reinforces R. Carneiro's classical theory, but also complements it with a general evolutionary mechanism. The first states emerged in response to historical challenges and concerns related to the economic, military and social development of barbarian societies, and then became the main magic wands in the political evolution of all world civilizations.

• The Computational Power of a Human Society: a New Model of Social Evolution

  • Wolpert, David;
  • Harper, Kyle

  Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of investigating human history, just when advances in complex systems science and computer science saw the emergence of powerful new conceptions of complex systems, and in particular new methods of measuring complexity. We propose that these advances in our understanding of complex systems and computer science should be brought to bear on our investigations into human history. To that end, we present a new framework for modeling how human societies co-evolve with their biotic environments, recognizing that both a society and its environment are computers. This leads us to model the dynamics of each of those two systems using the same, new kind of computational machine, which we define here. For simplicity, we construe a society as a set of interacting occupations and technologies. Similarly, under such a model, a biotic environment is a set of interacting distinct ecological and environmental processes. This provides novel ways to characterize social complexity, which we hope will cast new light on the archaeological and historical records. Our framework also provides a natural way to formalize both the energetic (thermodynamic) costs required by a society as it runs, and the ways it can extract thermodynamic resources from the environment in order to pay for those costs — and perhaps to grow with any left-over resources.

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• Political Stress Index of Poland

  • Stachowiak, Tomasz;
  • Pasek, Zbigniew

  We apply the political stress index as introduced by Boldstone (1991) and implemented by Turchin (2013), to the case study of Poland. The approach quantifies political and social unrest as a single quantity based on a multitude of economic and demographic variables. The present-day data allow us to directly apply index without the need of simulating the elite component, as was done previously. Neither model version shows appreciable unrest levels for the present, while the simulated model applied to partial historical data yields the index in remarkable agreement with the fall of communism in Poland.We next analyze the model's sensitive dependence on its parameters (the hallmark of chaos), which limits its utility and application to other countries. The original equations cannot, by construction, describe the elite fraction for longer time-periods; and we  propose a modification to remedy this problem. The model still holds some predictive power, but we argue that some components should be reinterpreted if one wants to keep its dynamical equations.