Elites, political disintegration, and ‘cliodynamics’

Intro:

In his recent book End Times, Peter Turchin tries to lay out his story about social, political, and economic change for a popular audience. The book is given added immediacy by its publisher’s subtitle: “Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration”. I know Turchin’s work quite well, and I know his underlying model well enough, and I think that End Times fails in this objective. I’ll come back to why this is later on, but first a bit of background on the underlying model and its intellectual history….