Book review: End Times, by Peter Turchin

Cheerful title, this one: End Times – Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, but an important topic from an unusual analyst. Peter Turchin is a ‘mathematical biologist’ by training, specialising in data science and ecology. He then took that expertise into a new field to pioneer the use of data science in analysing historical change, a discipline he calls ‘cliodynamics’. (Yes, I know that sounds like the fine tuning of small French cars, but the clio here is the latin muse of history.)

Turchin and his colleagues are interested in how societies break down, and the cycles of integration and disintegration that are observable in history. Golden ages are followed by decline and turmoil, and then re-emergence. The idea of cycles in history is nothing new – as the book says, the North African historian Ibn Khaldun had identified them by the 1300s, and Chinese historians well before that. What is new is the ability to take a scientific approach to this intuitive idea, record useful data from hundreds of different examples and look for patterns.

While the author warns that the patterns are not simple and not precise, they are nevertheless clear. Periods of turmoil follow a sequence. Good times start to break down because a gap opens up between the elites and the majority. The elites are getting richer, and shares for everyone else are shrinking. This creates mass disatisfaction, or ‘popular immiseration’ to use Turchin’s preferred term.

At the same time, the elites have been doing well and so there are more of them. More nobles in the old days, more millionaires and billionaires today. That creates a dynamic that Turchin calls ‘elite over-production’, where there are not enough positions for all the ambitious people who feel entitled to political power. Like a game of musical chairs, someone’s going to get left without a seat when the music stops. Those are the people that often end up leading counter-movements, offering easy explanations to the disastisfied masses.

The result of this pattern, popular immiseration + elite overproduction, is often revolution, conflict, and sometimes collapse – often with a triggering event such as a natural disaster or a pandemic. Again and again societies have gone through periods of violence and disorder before finding equilibrium again, often after reducing the number of the elites, one way or another. The ‘end times’ of the title then, is the recurring pattern of declines, rather than a declaration that we are at the end of history.

Turchin is particularly interested in the few examples where crisis has been averted, where countries have been on the brink of revolution and managed to avoid disaster. Reforms in Russia in the 1860s and 1870s ended serfdom to preserve the peace. Britain escaped a revolution during the Chartist uprising by giving the vote to all men, although it was also able to solve its elite over-production by exporting lots of them to jobs around the empire. A third period that the book highlights is the New Deal in the USA. In all three cases, there was sustained political focus on rebalancing power and wealth.

As well as explaining these patterns in history, End Times spends considerable time explaining the pattern now visible in our contemporary world, mainly in the United States. The bad news is that the current crisis is “too late to avert”, in Turchin’s opinion, but the solutions will ultimately lie in the same direction – reversing the upward flow of wealth that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, and through that rebalancing, tempering the competition for power by reducing the number of elites.

The points Turchin makes here aren’t unique. If you’re familiar with the work of Thomas Piketty or Anne Case and Angus Deaton, then you’ll know about the hollowing out of the middle class, and how wealth accrues fastest for the richest. You may have heard the arguments of movements like Occupy on the one hand, the populist right on the other, both with their own twist on the issue of elites and the disenfranchisement of the masses.

What Turchin attempts is to stand back from the political and economic arguments and look at underlying historical patterns. He uses new language, avoiding the favourite terms of the left or the right. That’s likely to annoy readers who are wedded to a particular terminology, but it’s clearly a deliberate choice. We’re not the first people to find ourselves in this situation. It’s happened again and again through history, and we’d be wise to think more broadly about it, rather than interpreting everything through our factional lenses. And if he’s right that it’s too late to avoid this round of turmoil, perhaps we can understand it well enough to prevent the next cycle from unfolding quite so disastrously.

• You can buy End Times from Earthbound Books UK or US.