Intro:
Peter Turchin sees disaster brewing as the West has overproduced a restless, revolutionary, elite
Is the study of history a science? Peter Turchin thinks so. The Russian-American “complexity scientist” departs from the traditional view of history as a subject in the humanities and is among the leaders of a faction who believe history adheres to social science’s rigid rules and abstract theories the way homo economicus behaves in the economic realm.
Readers should decide which history church they belong to before they crack open Peter Turchin’s catechism of historical social science, End Times. Nonetheless, even the most humane of humanists, someone who would otherwise bristle at Turchin’s mechanistic approach to history, will benefit from the mountain of data he has compiled and analyzed.