End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

by Peter Turchin

As data collection needed to answer this particular Big Question wound down, we gradually switched to a new Big Question: Why do complex societies periodically get into trouble? What are the factors explaining recurrent waves of high internal instability, state breakdown, and outright civil war? This question is usually formulated as: Why do complex societies collapse? In the last decade, a whole new scientific discipline, appropriately called collapsology,[14] has arisen to answer this question. To tell the truth, I am not much enamored of this new direction. What’s “collapse,” anyway? As I discuss in chapter 2, which relays what our macroscope sees in the past, outright collapse is only one possible outcome when societies get into trouble. Sometimes civil wars, massacres, and breakdowns of productive infrastructure, accompanied by epidemics, do indeed destroy the fabric of societies, resulting in huge population declines, simplification of governing institutions, and partial loss of knowledge. But some past societies emerged from their crises in a relatively bloodless way by implementing the right set of institutions that addressed the deep structural forces driving them to the edge. And most exits from crisis fall in between these two extremes.