End Times (Buch von 2023)

Angaben

Peter Turchin: End Times. Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration. Allen Lane, 2023.

Vernichtende Rezension aus "The New Statesman":

Who really needs End Times, when one can read the sweeping historical work of Piketty, Arrighi or Eric Hobsbawm instead? This is TED-Talk-lit that so vastly over-promises that the under-delivery is baked in from the start. The insistence that nothing can escape statistical model-building is ultimately a power grab, a determination to own and to control, not just the future but also adjacent scholarly disciplines. As Theodor W Adorno wrote of philosophical system-builders, this is a symptom of the “belly turned mind”.

Klappentext

For decades, complexity scientist Peter Turchin has been studying the world history like no-one else. Assembling vast databases mined from 10,000 years of human activity, and then developing new models, he has transformed the way we learn from the past. End Times is the result: a ground-breaking account of how society works.

The lessons, he argues, are clear. When the balance of power between the ruling class and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, income inequality surges. The rich get richer, the poor further impoverished. As more people try to join the elite, frustration with the establishment brims over, often with disastrous consequences. Elite overproduction led to state breakdown in imperial China, in medieval France, in the American Civil War – and it is happening now. Drawing insight from those occasions in history where the balance was restored, End Times also points towards a different future: an escape from the patterns of the past.