Bret Devereaux

Lecaque is really blunt here (as is his style) but as a historian, I had roughly the same reaction to Turchin's treatment of the evidence and the way that it flattens and essentializes complex things.

To put my own views out here, I think the problem ehre is essentially a Hayekian knowledge problem. The idea behind cliodynamics is that human societies "change in a somewhat predictable way" because "societies are systems."

But just as economics, as it has matured, has had to accept that the systems it studies are too complex (in part because they are systems where individuals can view the system and understand the system as a system) to predict perfectly, the same goes for societies.

Part of the reason history may rhyme but not repeat is that humans make future decisions with past historical knowledge. Thus, to go even further back, to Heraclitus, "you could not ever step into the same river twice" when it comes to decisions and processes.

Turchin's very confident predictions lack this sense of uncertainty, instead presenting a front of unjustified confidence, based in turn on evidence which often doesn't exist. It isn't "a more mature social science" but rather (borrowing C.S. Lewis' phrase) "a boy's philosophy."