War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

by Peter Turchin

WHEN RICH GET RICHER AND POOR get poorer, cooperation between social classes is undermined. But the same process is operating within each class. When some nobles are growing conspicuously more wealthy, while the majority of nobility is increasingly impoverished, the elites become riven by factional conflicts. Within the secular cycle, as the disintegrative phase follows the integrative one, inequality rises and falls. A life cycle of an imperial nation usually extends over the course of two, three, or even four secular cycles. Every time the empire enters a disintegrative secular phase, the asabiya of its core nation is significantly degraded. Eventually, this process of imperiopathosis reaches its terminal phase—the imperial nation loses its ability to cooperate, and the empire collapses. Most empires, therefore, fall for internal reasons. Paraphrasing Arnold Toynbee, great empires die not by murder, but by suicide. Chapter 11 Wheels Within Wheels The Many Declines of the Roman Empire Few topics in history have generated so much heated controversy and so little enlightenment as the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.