Historic recurrence
Historic recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history.[a][b] The concept of historic recurrence has variously been applied to overall human history (e.g., to the rises and falls of empires), to repetitive patterns in the history of a given polity, and to any two specific events which bear a striking similarity.[4]
Hypothetically, in the extreme, the concept of historic recurrence assumes the form of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, which has been written about in various forms since antiquity and was described in the 19th century by Heinrich Heine[c] and Friedrich Nietzsche.[d]
While it is often remarked that "history repeats itself", in cycles of less than cosmological duration this cannot be strictly true.[e] In this interpretation of recurrence, as opposed perhaps to the Nietzschean interpretation, there is no metaphysics. Recurrences take place due to ascertainable circumstances and chains of causality.[f]
An example is the ubiquitous phenomenon of multiple independent discovery in science and technology, described by Robert K. Merton and Harriet Zuckerman. Indeed, recurrences, in the form of reproducible findings obtained through experiment or observation, are essential to the natural and social sciences; and, in the form of observations rigorously studied via the comparative method and comparative research, are essential to the humanities.
G.W. Trompf, in his book The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, traces historically recurring patterns of political thought and behavior in the west since antiquity.[4] If history has lessons to impart, they are to be found par excellence in such recurring patterns.
Historic recurrences of the "striking-similarity" type can sometimes induce a sense of "convergence", "resonance" or déjà vu.[g]
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Ariel Dorfman
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Martin Indyk
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Elizabeth Kolbert
Arteny Malkov, Daria Khaltourina, Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends., Moscow, 2006, ISBN 5-484-00559-0. See especially chapter 2.
Andrey Korotayev
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Jackson Lears
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Robert K. Merton
"Ruthless and Truthless" (review of Peter Oborne, The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism, Simon and Schuster, February 2021, ISBN 978 1 3985 0100 3, 192 pp.; and Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Political Advice: Past, Present and Future, I.B. Tauris, February 2021, ISBN 978 1 83860 004 4, 240 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 9 (6 May 2021), pp. 3, 5–8.
Ferdinand Mount
"Dead in the Water: Aircraft carriers are costly and vulnerable to attack. And they employ workers in more than 364 congressional districts", The New Republic, June 2023, pp. 7–9.
Timothy Noah
"A Moral Witness" (review of Janet Somerville, ed., Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn's Letters of Love and War, 1930–1949, Firefly, 528 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVII, no. 15 (8 October 2020), pp. 29–31.
Fintan O'Toole
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Elizabeth Perry
"The Otherworldliness of Ibn Khaldun" (review of Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography, Princeton University Press, 2018, ISBN 9780691174662, 243 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 2 (February 7, 2019), pp. 23–24, 26.
Malise Ruthven
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George Santayana
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Pitirim Aleksandrovich Sorokin
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Big History
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Sam Tanenhaus
"Does History Repeat Itself?" Civilization on Trial, New York, Oxford University Press, 1948.
Arnold J. Toynbee
G.W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, from Antiquity to the Reformation, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979, 0-520-03479-1.
ISBN
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Paul Wilson
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Harriet Zuckerman
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