1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Social cycle theories are among the earliest social theories in sociology.
Interpretation of history as repeating cycles of Dark and Golden Ages was a common belief among ancient cultures.
The more limited cyclical view of history defined as repeating cycles of events was put forward in the academic world in the 19th century in historiosophy (a branch of historiography) and is a concept that falls under the category of sociology.
In recent times, P. R. Sarkar in his social cycle theory has used this idea to elaborate his interpretation of history.
The monarch's descendants, who lack virtue because of their family's power, become despots and the monarchy degenerates into a tyranny.
[11] Thomas Carlyle conceived of history as though it were a phoenix, growing and dying in stages akin to the seasons.
[12] Russian philosopher Nikolai Danilewski in Rossiia i Evropa (1869), differentiated between various smaller civilizations (Egyptian, Chinese, Persian, Greek, Roman, German, and Slav, among others).
A similar theory was put forward by Oswald Spengler, who in his Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918) also argued that the Western civilization had entered its final phase of development and its decline was inevitable.
In 2016, the first social cycle theory in sociology was created by Italian sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto in his Trattato di Sociologia Generale.
He interpreted the contemporary West as a sensate civilization dedicated to technological progress, and prophesied its fall into decadence and the emergence of a new ideational or idealistic era.
Alexandre Deulofeu developed a mathematical model of social cycles, that he claimed fit historical facts.
He argued that civilizations and empires go through cycles in his book Mathematics of History, written in Catalan, published in 1951.
Deulofeu believed he had found the origin of Romanesque art, during the 9th century, in an area between Empordà and Roussillon, which he argued was the cradle of the second cycle of western European civilization.
This is followed by a renewed Feudalism and agrarian society, and a gradual building up of increasingly advanced civilization—culminating with a new monstrous super-city which would eventually collapse again, and so on.
A later example is Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which begins in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear war, with the Catholic Church seeking to preserve a remnant of old texts, as it did in the historical Early Middle Ages, and ends with a new civilization, built up over two thousand years, once again destroying itself in a nuclear war.
In the future depicted in October the First Is Too Late, a 1966 science fiction novel by astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, the protagonists fly over where they expected to see the United States, but see no sign of urban civilization.
Because "world politics is not a random process of hit or miss, win or lose, depending on the luck of the draw or the brute strength of the contestants", anarchy does not play a role; long cycles have provided, for the last five centuries, a means for the successive selection and operation of numerous world leaders.
[22] Despite frequent use of the term business cycles to refer to changes in an economy around its trend line, the phrase is considered a misnomer.
It is widely agreed that fluctuations in economic activity do not exhibit any kind of predictable repetition over time, and the appearance of cycles is a result of pareidolia.
[26] What is important is that on the basis of their models Nefedov, Turchin and Malkov have managed to demonstrate that sociodemographic cycles were a basic feature of complex agrarian systems, and not a specifically Chinese or European phenomenon.
This alternation typically has a period of about two human generation times (40 – 60 years), and Turchin calls it a "fathers and sons" cycle.
Each generational persona unleashes a new era, called a turning, in which a new social, political, and economic climate exists.
They are part of a larger cyclical "saeculum", a long human life, which usually spans between 80 and 90 years, although some saecula have lasted longer.
Historian Samuel P. Huntington has proposed that American history has had several bursts of "creedal passion" roughly every 60 years.
Political scientist Stephen Skowronek has proposed that American history has gone through several regimes, with four main types of presidencies.