Scholarly Reviews

The Great Holocene Transformation: What Complexity Science Tells Us about the Evolution of Complex Societies Peter Turchin Beresta Books (2025) An ambitious analysis of a vast trove of data from 800 societies around the world concludes that there’s safety in numbers. When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519, he found monarchs,…

In End Times, Peter Turchin takes us on three journeys: One is his personal history of the discovery of patterns in history, which form the basis for his development of cliodyamics; a second is his tracing of the primary pattern, namely how elite overproduction and popular immiseration have repeatedly led to state breakdowns across history; and third is…

C. Dale Walton (DWalton@lindenwood.edu) is a professor of international relations and Hammond Institute senior fellow at Lindenwood University. His is the author of numerous works, including the books The Myth of Inevitable US Defeat in Vietnam (2002); Geopolitics and the Great Powers in the Twenty-First Century (2007); and Grand Strategy and the…

Do you feel like we’re living in the end times? We do, sometimes. With each hit of unprecedented bad news, the country feels more and more as if it’s careening toward apocalypse.…

“Peter Turchin’s Ultra Society lurches back to the microevolution analogy. Here the driving force in human cultural history is intergroup competition, meaning war. Thus, history will be reducible to military tactics, technology to weaponry, and culture to its EurAsian cutting edge.…

“Ultrasociety is written with élan and elegance, and the argument presented by the author is new and thoughtprovoking. Contrary to other scholars in the field, Turchin accentuates war as the fundamental evolutionary driver.…

Ultrasociety to jedna z pierwszych analiz powstałych dzięki wykorzystaniu coraz popularniejszego podejścia badawczego nazywanego eksploracją Big Data. Rzecz jasna komputery wyłącznie wspomagają analizy, zaś idea rodzi się w głowie badacza.…

In this ambitious, learned, and valuable book, biologist-turned-historian Peter Turchin addresses three big topics, which he defines as “the evolution of cooperation, the destructive and creative faces of war, and the strange trajectory of human egalitarianism” (230). His main goal is to explain the undeniable fact that humans are ultrasocial.…

Peter Turchin, an exemplary interdisciplinary professor and scholar, has set out to remedy this scarcity of mathematical history using classic applied mathematics and solid historical data, and none too soon. His latest book, Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History, is a warning shot across the bow of the U.S.…

Ultra Society is the most recent book by Peter Turchin, the polymath evolutionary scientist, and author of numerous scholarly and popular works on cultural and social evolution.…

Professor Turchin’s new book Ultrasociety identifies the causal mechanisms hidden in the twists and turns of human civilisation by quantifying the rise and fall of empires. The book translates some of Turchin’s academic work on cliodynamics, making it accessible to the interested lay reader. What is cliodynamics?…

What is the motive force of history? Peter Turchin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, and Sergey Nefedov, a senior research scientist at the Institute of History and Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, attempt to provide an answer to that question with a masterful, interdisciplinary synthesis of…

Historical Dynamics is a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at an effort to turn informal theories into cogent mathematical models capable of producing fresh insights.

“The book is well organized and clearly argued. … unlike some simple-minded mathematical modelers, Turchin is very familiar with the relevant literature and has made a genuine effort to incorporate historical data into his models.…

“History has had a long, and on the whole fruitful, relationship with adjacent subjects such as archaeology and anthropology, and is just emerging from a testing (and largely negative) cohabitation with literary and cultural theory.…

Here scientist Turchin (ecology & evolutionary biology, Univ. of Connecticut) takes on the apparent chaotic nature of history and through the prism of mathematical models and behavioral theories concludes that there are persistent cyclical historical patterns that he calls cliodynamics

In a review1 of Peter Turchin’s Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall, Joseph Tainter observes that theories of cycles in history are themselves subject to cycles in popularity, from the second-century-BC Greek historian Polybius, who predicted the demise of the Roman Empire 600 years in advance, to the early twentieth century’s Oswald Spengler,…